For those often overlooked by society, books can be a powerful way to be heard. For Professor Steven Bickmore, books have made him a powerful advocate.
Addressing injustice and marginalization is difficult when you don’t understand the experience. Luckily, that’s where novels can help; they allow readers to both see the world from a different perspective and process their own experiences. In his own life, Steven Bickmore (an emeritus professor of English education at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas) has found that books have played a key role in helping him become more empathetic. In his presentation for the English Department’s annual Grass Lecture on January 16, 2025, titled “Reading as a Life Journey: Exploring and Enhancing Our ‘Real’ Life Experiences through Literature,” Bickmore shared how the books he’s read have helped him become more compassionate by opening his eyes to the life experiences of marginalized people around him.
Perspective-Changing Prose
Bickmore’s literary journey started in fifth grade after he befriended a Jewish boy named Michael. That friendship made his experience with Emily Cheney Neville’s book Berries Goodman all the more poignant when he later encountered it. The story depicted the difficulties of being Jewish in America, and Bickmore was struck by the idea that his friend might have struggled with some of the same troubles. He said, “I wondered, could I be there to make a difference?”
While he had a range of choices from which to choose, it was never as large and as free as the range of choices that I had along the way.
The memoir Makes Me Wanna Holler by Nathan McCall had a similar effect on Bickmore because it described McCall’s experiences growing up as a young Black man in America. Bickmore and McCall share the same birth year, and reading McCall’s experiences year by year forced Bickmore to recognize the disparity between the opportunities they were each offered. “While he had a range of choices from which to choose, it was never as large and as free as the range of choices that I had along the way,” Bickmore said. “McCall, as a Black man, says that all of these experiences make him want to holler. . . . Reading his experience makes me, a White man, want to shut up.”
Determined to Make a Difference
Thanks to these books and countless others, Bickmore has spent his career trying to advocate for marginalized people. As a high school teacher in Salt Lake City, he often taught Shakespeare’s Othello and The Merchant of Venice so he could help his students examine the ways that Othello and Shylock were marginalized. And in Bickmore’s academic work, he’s most proud of On the Shoulders of Giants: Celebrating African American Authors of Young Adult Literature, a collection of three books that he edited on the history of young adult literature, written by and about African American scholars. “Over the three volumes, we went out of our way to recruit authors of color to write their own story and analyze the books that represent their existence in the world,” Bickmore said.
Bickmore expressed his gratitude for the gift of reading and the opportunity he’s had to widen his perspective through books. He said, “Reading has helped me be less self-centered. Reading has helped me understand others. . . . It’s been my privilege to choose a career where reading has been a gift.”
Find On the Shoulders of Giants at the publisher’s website here.