Program Type:
Celebration Month, Featured, Author Talk, Book Discussion, Community Engagement, Cultural Appreciation, Literature, Miss Breed- Registration is encouraged for this event.
- Registration will close on March 10, 2026 @ 4:00pm.
- There are 86 seats remaining.
Program Description
Event Details
Best-selling award-winning children’s and YA author Maggie Tokuda-Hall delivers the 5th Annual Clara Breed Civil Liberties Lecture, named after heroic former San Diego Public Library director Clara E. Breed.
Maggie Tokuda-Hall is the author of numerous award winning children’s and YA books including Love in the Library and The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea. She has been called “… one of the most unflinching voices in contemporary genre literature.”
Refreshments served at 6pm, followed by the lecture at 6:30pm.
A longtime children’s bookseller, Maggie's priority and guiding principle for all her work is to tell the truth, meeting children where they are, and suggesting to them questions they may not yet know the answers to. She reached national attention when she publicly refused to accept a licensing offer for Love in the Library, from Scholastic, who demanded a series of edits to her author’s note that whitewashed the history of Japanese American incarceration during WWII.
Maggie's writing has been featured in Harper’s Bazaar, Densho, Electric Literature, etc. She is a founding member and national leader of Authors Against Book Bans. She is the co-host of the Failure to Adapt podcast.
The Clara Breed Civil Liberties Lecture honors Miss Breed's triple legacy of service, decency, and advocacy on behalf of Japanese Americans wrongly imprisoned in concentration camps by the federal government during World War II. Learn more about this on our website: mysdpl.org/civilliberties