People

Librarians Elaine R. Hicks, Stacy Brody, and Sara Loree have been named LJ's 2021 Librarians of the Year for their work with the Librarian Reserve Corps, helping the World Health Organization manage the flood of COVID-19 information.

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."

When Pang Yang realized there were not enough children’s books written in Karen in the Saint Paul Public Library (SPPL), she partnered with community members to publish two bilingual picture books for the city’s growing Burmese refugee community. More than 5,000 copies were distributed throughout the city and to some schools.

In 2019 Lesley Mason, then library director at Caldwell County Public Library, NC, wanted a Black History Month program that would resonate with the county’s largely white rural farming community. Post-recession, many families had turned to gardening, so she reached out to the local chapter of the NAACP and the State Extension’s Master Gardeners to bring in Rev. Richard Joyner, whose community garden at the Conetoe Family Life Center, NC, helped transform his town. The library also hosted an exhibit of photography by John Francis Ficara, titled Distant Echoes—Black Farmers in America, from the Reginald F. Lewis Museum in Baltimore, MD. More than 50 people attended Joyner’s talk and another 500 viewed him on a Facebook live stream. Circulation jumped up by 3,000 items that month, Mason says.