Ivy R. Taylor was elected Mayor of San Antonio on June 13, 2015. Prior to her election, she earned an appointment to the seat from her city council colleagues in July 2014, making her the first African American woman to serve as mayor of a city with more than one million people and only the second female mayor of San Antonio. Before becoming mayor, she served on city council for five years.

2.12.2017  San Antonio’s Mayor Ivy Taylor shares her love of literature and literacy

As we commemorate Black History Month this February, an occasion that honors leaders and achievements in the African American community, consider this. San Antonio’s mayor Ivy R. Taylor is the first African American female in U.S. history to ever serve as mayor of city of more than 1 million. Mayor has enthusiastically supported reading in her leadership role, and the city of San Antonio is one of the nation’s leading cities in encouraging literary arts—with the Mayor’s Book Club, the San Antonio Book Festival, the Poets Laureate program, and more.

LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE: How did you come to settle in San Antonio, Mayor Taylor, and what attracted you to the city?

IVY R. TAYLOR: The official answer is: a job. I was recruited by the San Antonio Affordable Housing Association to fill a summer position developing a collaborative outreach plan. The real answer is: A man! I was working on my master’s degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill when I had the opportunity to come to San Antonio for a summer internship. At church one Sunday, I met Rodney, and after I finished graduate school, I moved to San Antonio to be with him. We’ve been married eighteen years now.

You were the first mayor of San Antonio to launch a mayor’s book club, in 2014. At the time you said that San Antonio had literacy problems and you wanted to launch the club to create a culture of reading in the city. In the three years since the club’s launch, what successes can you share about the program?

I actually started the book club when I was a City Council member representing District 2, and as mayor, I’ve been able to expand it citywide. I love reading, and I want everyone in the community to love it too. Reading encourages literacy and helps create a community dialogue where we can explore universal topics, create a greater understanding of what binds us together and grow the compassion among us all. It’s so rewarding to listen to the family stories and individual discoveries that have resulted from San Antonio readers’ engaging with the books I’ve chosen, which have tended to be memoirs and personal histories.

It appears that your book club has a spring selection and a fall selection. So you’re on your sixth book, I think, what’s the process like for the book selection?

The selection process varies, although it has to be a book I haven’t read yet. I want to discover it along with our readers. A few times I’ve chosen books that I’m interested in reading, and other times I’ve asked for recommendations from our San Antonio Public Library staff.

The book club is just one area where the city of San Antonio helps advance literacy and the literary arts. I’ve noticed that the San Antonio Book Festival is becoming one of the fastest growing book events in the state—and the country. How does the city assist with that initiative?

The City of San Antonio is proud to partner with the San Antonio Public Library Foundation and the San Antonio Book Festival on this fantastic celebration of learning and literature. We assist by contributing funding as well as providing promotional support, and we are very happy with how it has grown in the last few years. With more than ninety authors as featured speakers and other activities, it has quickly become a key event for our City.

I have enjoyed hosting Mayor’s Book Club programs in conjunction with the Festival. Last year I hosted a discussion the day of the Book Festival in one of the program tents to talk about my 2016 spring book club pick, The Book Thief.

Most metro cities in Texas now have an office of cultural affairs—the arts are such a huge economic engine—but I’ve noticed that San Antonio specifically gives literary arts a place at the table. Oftentimes, visual arts and performing arts dominate a city’s developmental focus, but your website—I love the name, www.getcreativesanantonio.com—showcases literary events in the city as well. What can you tell our readers about the focus of your Department of Arts & Culture?

San Antonio honors and celebrates our cultural heritage through the arts, and the literary arts are absolutely an important part of how we tell those stories. San Antonio continues to be a city that celebrates the written word and is a leader, in many cases, in doing so. In 2012, for example, San Antonio was the first major city in Texas to appoint a Poet Laureate. Our San Antonio Poet Laureate Program is managed by the Department of Arts and Culture, which advocates for the growth of and supports our local creative industry.

We recognize the arts are vital to enriching the quality of life in our community, and the department works diligently to develop and market a wide range of programs and events for the residents and visitors of San Antonio. These programs and events showcase the immense artistic talent we have in our city.

In addition to the Poet Laureate program, the Department of Arts & Culture also oversees several programs and divisions including arts funding, public art, cultural events and exhibits, filmmaking and music. Through these efforts, the department helps the City of San Antonio enhance our community by leading and investing in local arts and culture.

In 2012, as you’ve pointed out, San Antonio became the first major Texas city to name a poet laureate. Last year, the city named their third poet to take that role. What do you see as the benefits of the city’s poet laureate program?

San Antonio designates a Poet Laureate every two years to utilize the power of poetry and literature and to encourage literacy and learning in our city. The position is an important one as the individual selected also helps generate public interest in the arts, preserve the art of poetry and promote creative expression from our community.

What role did reading play in your life when you were growing up? Who were some of your favorite authors then and who are some of your favorite authors now?

I was a quiet teenager whose parents’ involvement in a Pentecostal Holiness Church kept me from social norms. I couldn’t wear pants, makeup or jewelry; I couldn’t listen to secular music; and I couldn’t go to the movies. Instead, I escaped into the world of books.

Mr. Pine’s Purple House by Leonard Kessler was one of my favorite books when I began reading in about 1975. As I grew older, two books in particular had a lasting impact on me—Gone with the Wind and Roots. I sometimes say that they are in my DNA. It’s an odd combination, I know, but I was captivated by the drama and history in Gone with the Wind, and Roots perfectly balanced out the shame of those slavery days which are the focus of Gone with the Wind. I have also read Pride and Prejudice at least ten times; some of Jane Austen’s characters feel like old friends to me.

Nowadays I don’t read as much as I’d like because being the mayor, a mom and a wife keeps me pretty busy, but I find myself drawn to books about urban planning, revitalization, cities and public policy. One of the most memorable was Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser. I loved reading his observations about the physical and social characteristics that make cities vibrant and vital and why cities continue to be important in the twenty-first century.

You are the first female African-American mayor of a city with such a large population, making you the mayor of the largest city in the United States to have a black female mayor. Since February is Black History Month, what leadership roles would recommend to young African Americans?

When I was a girl I read to explore the world, and recently I gave a talk in which I focused on how reading helps us create our own identities. How do we know who we are? As we grow, we experience new things, learn more about ourselves and meet people who help shape us. But how are we able to envision what’s possible? What does it mean to be a woman, a black woman, or an American? Young people who have access to other people’s stories through novels and memoirs can learn about and identify with great leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt, but just as importantly they can understand other people’s struggles. I may not have been twenty-year-old Bigger Thomas, a negro living in poverty on Chicago’s south side in the 1930s, but his story, his struggle—shared in the book Native Son by Richard Wright—opened my eyes to race relations and the criminal justice system.

San Antonio has such a wealth of authors. What do you think it is about the city that inspires writing?

San Antonio is a welcoming and diverse city where anyone can find a niche, and it’s a relatively affordable place to live. Sometimes when I hear discussions about “the creative economy” I want to remind folks that all of us are creative, especially in San Antonio, from kids submitting poems to the SAPL’s Young Pegasus contest to all the San Antonians who make their own Fiesta hats and medals. Our city was founded as a confluence of cultures, to use an old line from the 1968 World’s Fair, and that kind of cross-fertilization allows us to tell unique stories that have a global resonance, which was recognized through our UNESCO designation last year. And we’re celebrating our Tricentennial in 2018, so that’s three hundred years of stories.

The current mayor’s book club selection is San Antonioan Jan Jarboe Russell’s The Train to Crystal City. What made you choose this book?

I haven’t featured a book written by a San Antonio author, so I thought this was a great opportunity to choose a local author and a story about South Texas. The Train to Crystal City fits so well with other works I’d selected because it offers each of us an opportunity to see history through the eyes of “the other,” just as Twelve Years A Slave and Rocket Boys did, and ultimately to recognize that we’re not so different after all. As Americans, it’s important for us to understand rather than just gloss over painful chapters in our history. We need the knowledge to make better choices in the future so that we can continue to work toward reaching the ideals this country was founded upon.

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