CynthiaParkhill

Among books I’ve recently completed: Shapes of Love by L. V. Peñalba has the capacity to expand which orientations and which types of rel...

In honor of International Non-Binary People’s Day, observed each year on July 14, I recommend The Gender Binary Is a Big Lie by Lee Wind. ...

Among worrying legislation at the federal level, H.R. 2616 recently passed in the U.S. House of Representatives . It’s troubling enough that...

I just posted a review on Google Maps for the Berkeley Public Library, about a feature at the downtown library that felt particularly welcom...

In my latest book-talk: I love Opting Out, the soon-to-be-published middle-grade graphic novel by Maia Kobabe and Swati “Lucky” Srikumar. ...

In Louisville, Kentucky, Councilmember J.P. Lyninger has introduced legislation to designate Louisville as a “Safe Haven City” for transgend...

As a follow-up to the essay I posted earlier , here is a brief video I uploaded today about H.R. 7661. Introduced in late February by U.S....

One of the core tenets that I embrace as a librarian serving young people is that readers need stories about people who are both like and wh...

To commemorate the National Day of Reading on Feb. 27, 2026, here is a complete reading of Marley’s Pride by Joëlle Retener with illustra...

Amid ever-increasing incidents of book challenges, I’m worried by inflammatory rhetoric that portrays librarians and authors as “groomers...

Santa Rosa City Schools recently accepted a donation of books from an organization called Open Books: 12 books apiece to each of 10 elemen...

Asexual and Autistic pride flag. Credit: COUPOSANTO on reddit The UCM Scholars Symposium, on April 3, 2025, included my slide-show and pre-...

As an autistic and queer student and an acting librarian for young people, I’m interested in how autistic people are portrayed in children’s...

This is a graphic memoir of how the author, Theo Parish, came to understand and to comfortably inhabit their nonbinary identity. I really ...

Being nonbinary, I found so many things to appreciate about Ollie in Between , which concerns a nonbinary 13-year-old navigating gender ex...

Over the summer I’ve been helping out in a high-school English classroom. Each morning, the teacher assigns her students to work from a writ...

I adored this graphic memoir about a nonbinary person coming into their identity. Like the author, Theo Parish, I had to navigate arbitrary ...

During Autism Acceptance Month, April 2024, I am reading Paige Not Found by Jen Wilde. It features a protagonist who is autistic and nonb...

My studies this semester in Children’s and Young Adult Literature included the importance of books that can offer their readers “mirrors, wi...

A question was posed to me as part of my studies in Children’s and Young Adult Literature: How would I provide reader’s advisory for young p...