Dave Eggers Opens a Library for Youth, by Youth in San Francisco

In San Francisco, where you’re hard pressed to find a bathroom to use without buying a $7 coffee, third spaces where one can simply hang out are rare. And ones that actually welcome children and teenagers are even rarer.

Enter the International Youth Library on Valencia Street, where six days a week you can curl up on a cozy, green velvet couch and flip through adventure stories by elementary students from a school down the street. There’s straight-up silliness, out-there imagination and raw honesty, including a zine by a Buffalo, New York fifth grader with the title A Field Guide to Being Sad and Attracting the Attention of Big Fat Rats and Also Feeling Awful All the Time. You’ll also find first-hand accounts from teenagers who survived hurricanes in Puerto Rico and ethnic persecution in Afghanistan, and poetry by young people contending with COVID, incarceration and gentrification.

“If you wanted to take the pulse of young people of a certain moment in time, this would be, I think, the world’s foremost archive of what young people have been thinking over the last 23 years,” says the founder, author Dave Eggers.

With the help of his small team, the Newbery Medal-winning novelist of The Eyes and the Impossible and The Circle established the International Youth Library as an extension of the nonprofit he co-founded across the street, 826 Valencia, which has been tutoring, nurturing and publishing young writers for over two decades. Over the years, people inspired by their model have opened sister organizations across the U.S. and in far-flung locations like Iceland, Italy and Pakistan. Over 300 young writers from those programs, loosely affiliated under the International Alliance of Youth Writing Centers, are featured in the library.

826 Valencia has impressive alumni, including award-winning poet Sally Wen Mao, who just published her debut short story collection; Chinaka Hodge, a poet and screenwriter currently leading the writers’ room of Marvel’s Ironheart; and Daniel Gumbiner, novelist and editor of McSweeney’s culture magazine The Believer.

But accolades aren’t necessarily the goal of the program. In an age of book bans, where conservative legislators and activists want to keep students away from issues deemed too inappropriate — like race and sexual identity — Eggers and his team believe in giving young minds more credit.

“Writing is a really unique, really powerful tool for young people who really don’t have a lot of power in their communities,” says Eggers. “They should have a seat at the table. They should have a seat on the school board. They should have a seat in city council, all of these things, because anything that happens and affects the rest of us in the city affects them, even sometimes more so.”

Jade Howe, who curates and runs the day-to-day operations at the International Youth Library, sees that empowering effect when curious kids wander in and realize they’ve entered a place where their ideas are taken seriously and their imaginations celebrated. The library even takes submissions.

“That’s so exciting for a kid to be like, ‘I’m in a real library. I’m a real writer,’” says Howe.

“You are,” Howe tells them. “You don’t have to be a grown-up to be able to tell these great stories. There are people that care. I care. That’s why I’m here. And we want to hear you guys out.”

While the pessimistic adults among us might assume that all kids want to do is scroll TikTok, or that reading and writing will fall by the wayside because of ChatGPT, on the ground Howe and Eggers see an appetite for the printed page and written word. They’re working on expanding the International Youth Library to utilize the full square footage of the storefront, which once housed local concert promoter Noise Pop and art studio Refugee Eye (which will continue to mount exhibitions in the space).

“Kids still love reading,” says Howe. “Kids still want to have a physical book. There’s something so nebulous about the internet and screens, where it’s just like stuff goes out there and there’s so much of it. But we taught this class with a bunch of fifth graders, and kids are still absolutely demolishing the same stories that I was reading when I was their age.”

The International Youth Library is located at 849 Valencia St., San Francisco. It’s open weekday and Saturday afternoons until 6 p.m.