How I'm Choosing to Celebrate a Perfect Square Birthday

Hi all,

I have been thinking lately about hope and healing, about learning and resilience, about what it takes to get there. I’ve spent the majority of my life in love with learning and trying to share that love with others. So what better time to celebrate it than on a birthday involving perfect squares? I’m turning 36 years old next week and I’m doing a lot of reflecting during these shelter-in days. 

When we were younger, my dad would take us to our favorite Chicago Public Library branch. There, we would spend hours grabbing book after book from the shelves and happily spending an afternoon there. These trips would either be culminated with a trip to Devon for a samosa or my dad’s favorite taxicab burger hole, Mr. J’s, where we would each get a fried fish sandwich and way too many fries. 

Books have always been my first friends, my first loves. It’s there I learned to be an explorer, a dreamer, a poet, a mathematician, a scientist, a scholar. It’s there I pretended to be an astronaut, a wizard, a superhero, a mermaid, a princess (and sometimes a princess fairy mermaid). 

For this birthday, Joe and I are going to build a little free library outside of our home in Little Village. I’m hoping to stock books there that I can share with neighborhood kids and the larger community.

I am hoping you can join me in helping me put books in the hands of kids who need them. So, I’m asking if you could send me a book or two that made a difference in your childhood, that helped you explore and learn and grow and feel. 

Here are some Chicago bookstores that I would love to support for my community library:

• Semicolon - Chicago's Only Black-Woman Owned Bookstore
• Women & Children First Bookstore
• 57th Street Bookstore

Here are some titles that are popular amongst the middle-school/younger set that I would love to have in my library:

• The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas
• I am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, Erika L Sanchez
• The Poet X, Elizabeth Acevedo
• Illegal, Eoin Colfer
• Missing Daddy, Mariame Kabe
• The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros
• Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You: A Remix, Jason Reynolds & Ibram Kendi
• Dear Martin, Nic Stone
• Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
• Zita the Space Girl Series, Ben Hatke
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid Series, Jeff Kinney
• Smile Series, Raina Telgemeir
• Monster: A Graphic Novel, Walter Dean Myers
• Nimona,  Noelle Stevenson

Venmo is: @Sara-Rezvi
​profile pic is of me cuddling a baby goat. My 34th bday was spent doing goat yoga at the Garfield Park Conservatory =)

In the comment box, please tell me which book you'd like for me to purchase and I will do so from one of the independent bookstores listed above. Once it arrives, I will tag you on Twitter or Facebook in gratitude. 

Or, If you’d like to send a well loved book from your personal collection or purchase a new one for donation, please DM or email me (rezvi@uic.edu) for our home address.

I’m hoping that through art, through reading, through getting to know each other in the community Joe and I share, I learn and grow myself. Once everything is assembled, I plan on posting photos of what it looks like at our place!

Shout out to the #DisruptTexts community for helping me broaden my own scope of reading and for challenging me to look beyond Western canons. 

With love,

Sara