Two IC Community Members Named Reading Ambassadors

By Suzannah Van Gelder ’20, December 12, 2019

Buffalo Street Books’ “Ithaca is Books” ambassadorship program names Luca Maurer and Nia Nunn as ambassadors of reading.

Luca Maurer was one of two Ithaca College community members selected as an Ithaca is Books ambassador.

(Photo by: Buffalo Street Books)

Reading, as most of us picture it, is a one-on-one relationship between a person and a book. Local independent bookstore Buffalo Street Books wants to re-imagine reading as a community act. Now in its second year, its Ithaca is Books literary ambassador program highlights readers in the community and their favorite books.

This year, among the ambassadors chosen are Nia Nunn, associate professor in Ithaca College’s Department of Education, and Luca Maurer, the college’s director of LGBTQ Education, Outreach and Services.

As ambassadors, the selected individuals choose around five books that had an impact on their lives. As evidence for their love of reading, neither Maurer nor Nunn could limit their list to five books, choosing six instead. In both lists, identity is a major theme. Whether focused on gender, race, class, sexuality or the intersection of all four, their selected books have something to say about what it means to navigate oneself in the world.

“I think that access to reading and access to materials to read is fundamental to justice and to freedom. For me, it’s not just a personal connection, I think of it as fundamental to democracy.”

Luca Maurer

Nia Nunn and Luvelle Brown, superintendent of the Ithaca City School District and a member of the Ithaca College Board of Trustees. (Photo by: Buffalo Street Books)

Maurer said reading “open[ed] up worlds that [he] didn’t know about” at a young age, and cited one of his listed books, “I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip.” He stumbled upon the book in his local library, and discovered one of the characters was gay.

“That was the first time I ever saw anything similar to my experience reflected,” he said.

For Maurer, reading often extends beyond the personal and into the political. “I think that access to reading and access to materials to read is fundamental to justice and to freedom,” he said. “For me, it’s not just a personal connection, I think of it as fundamental to democracy.”

Nunn described how she would color in her “Dick and Jane” books with brown crayon. As a teenager, she snuck books into her summer job to pass time. It was there that she first read Toni Morrison, citing the novel “Sula” as her “black feminism 101.”

Nunn tries to rethink and reinvent reading. She regularly asks her students about their various connections to reading, including where they read, how they encounter their sources, and what emotions or sensations reading produces for them.

“I have all my students reflect on who they are as readers,” Nunn said.

Maurer and Nunn are not the first IC community members to serve as ambassadors in the program. Last year, President Shirley M. Collado, Sean Eversley Bradwell, and Nicole Eversley Bradwell were each selected.