Library Journal apologizes for the pain we caused and failed to address in announcing the Library of the Year. While we stand by the award, we commit to taking the following action steps.

When we announced The Seattle Public Library (SPL) as the 2020 Gale/LJ Library of the Year yesterday, many librarians protested our celebrating a library that had allowed the Women’s Liberation Front, an anti-trans group, to rent a meeting room for an event in February. We hear the anger and disappointment and take these concerns seriously. We understand why SPL’s board of trustees made the decision it did, but we wish that the library had not allowed that event to go forward. Nonetheless, Library Journal stands by the award, and we want to explain why.

The Seattle Public Library has turned its attention outward, actively listening to community needs and transforming its work to make equity a top priority, earning it the 2020 Gale/LJ Library of the Year award.

The 2020 Pulitzer Prizes were announced on YouTube on Monday, May 4, by Pulitzer administrator Dana Canedy.  Here, this year’s poetry winner talks about reading what’s on the page and a love for verse that started in the library.

As a homeschooled kid in Gurnee, IL, Eddie Kristan found his lifeline at the Warren-Newport Public Library (WNPL). "The library provided me with books and a safe place to read and watch media," he says, recalling how he read all seven banned-at-home Harry Potter books there. But even more importantly, the library gave him the human contact he craved.

Nearly half of Los Angeles’s four million people are Latinx, from more than 20 Latin American and Caribbean countries. As multilingual collections manager of Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL), Anna Avalos selects Spanish-language materials for all 73 branches, as well as offering collection assessments and recommendations to branches that don’t have Spanish-speaking staff. In the nearly three years she’s been in the position, she’s quadrupled the Spanish collection. She also acquires Armenian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Russian, and Thai content.

Thanks to Stephanie Katz, what started as a zero-dollar budget proposal is now an international arts magazine with 20 online issues—including annual teen issues—and a print anthology. Katz, assistant supervisor of technical services at Manatee County Public Library System (MCPLS), founded 805 Lit + Art, or simply 805, in 2015 and has since made a name for herself as a grassroots library-based publisher. 805 has published 188 writers and 135 artists from Florida and beyond, about ten percent of whom are international.

Glenna Godinsky’s mother spent the last four years of her life living with Godinsky, her husband, and their three kids after she developed Lewy Body dementia. Says Godinsky, "we learned by doing, and that skill set has helped me, daily, in my role at the library."