New York– there are many ways to win I Love My Librarian Award.
You can be a fighter against book bans, like Valerie Byrd Fort at the University of South Carolina; Or a mentor to graduate students researching biomedicine, like Joan Doucette at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, or transforming a dark basement into a gathering place for families, like Mary Anne Rousseau at the Hubbard Public Library in Ohio.
She is one of 10 recipients of the I Love My Librarian Award, which comes with a $5,000 cash prize and a $750 stipend. American Library Association The annual conference, this year, was held in Chicago from June 25-29. The winners were selected from a pool of more than 1,300 submissions by library patrons who explain how “a librarian made a difference in your life or went above and beyond to serve your community.”
“We recognize the remarkable contributions these 10 librarians have made to our communities, learning, our health, and the public well-being,” ALA President Sam Helmick said in a statement Monday. “These librarians are the people who power the possibilities in our neighborhoods, our schools, and our places of higher education. Their leadership, creativity, and innovation strengthen the communities they serve, and we are proud to honor them.”
Other winners include Tracy Fitzmaurice of Jackson County, North Carolina, praised by ALA as a “transformational leader for rural libraries”; Deb Sica of the Alameda County Library in Fremont, California, champion of diversity and intellectual freedom; Zachary Stier, who has worked for years on literacy projects at the Erickson Public Library in Boone, Iowa; and Christine Szeluga of Cranford High School in New Jersey, where she received a grant for a podcast studio and history archive.
Also cited were Mahasin Amin, whose initiatives at Indiana University cover everything from health literacy to information literacy; Mia Gitlen, who transformed the closed library at Milpitas High School in California; and Jenny Cox of Georgetown Middle School in South Carolina who worked to raise funding for thousands of new books.
The awards, established in 2008, are presented by the ALA, the New York Public Library, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
