Cynthia Baseman

Cynthia Baseman read E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web in second grade and has been a fan of books with themes of friendship and kindness ever since. Her career has always followed curiosity — from blogging about animals, the environment, and parenting to creating a kindness campaign through an illustrated children’s book series, to writing a young adult romance novel about neurodiverse teens. Again and again, her work returns to a central question: where do we find truth? In recent years, that question has led her deeper into library advocacy.

As a library board member at The University of Southern California (Go Trojans!), she champions libraries as rare public spaces where information is curated with care, context, and accountability. To her, libraries are both sanctuary and engine: places where questions are welcomed, and where communities discover not only books, but tools, resources, and one another. Cynthia lives in Los Angeles with her husband, their spirited rescue dog, and four endlessly chatty cockatiels. Between her two grown sons and her vocal pets, her household is much like a good library: never entirely quiet and always full of stories.