As excellent as the content has been, my favorite benefit of an in-person event is the side conversations and unexpected connections. Tonight, after the sessions ended, attendees made their way back to hotels and the airport. One person made a kind invitation in the conference app to meet up for dinner. After so many focused conversations, it was an absolute delight to gather with a group of strangers who all love public libraries. We came from around the country, different library sizes, and different jobs within them.
Category: PLA 2026
#PLA2026 Closing Session: Sean Sherman and What Libraries Pass Down
PLA President Dr. Brandy A. McNeil of The New York Public Library opened the PLA 2026 Closing Session in a packed auditorium. She thanked attendees for helping one another find lost phones, clothing, cookies, and skyways during the week and for making a point of supporting Twin Cities businesses when they could. McNeil then introduced Sean Sherman, an Oglala Lakota chef from Pine Ridge and the founder of North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NĀTIFS), which includes the Indigenous Food Lab. Sherman also opened the award-winning restaurant Owamni in Minneapolis. I heard only about half of his remarks before leaving for the airport, but the half I heard gave PLA 2026 a strong final question: what kinds of knowledge do public institutions preserve, normalize, and pass down?
Gateway to Reading #PLA26
Empowering caregivers with the tools they need to be their child’s first and most important teacher is a core role of children’s librarians. We model early literacy practices during storytime and curate parenting collections to support milestones and challenging topics, but many caregivers are also looking for more direct guidance when it comes to helping their child learn to read. Beyond offering early reader collections, my library currently does not have many opportunities to expand how we support families through this critical stage of development.
#PLA2026: DigitalLearn, Confidence, and Teen Service-Learning
At a public desk, digital questions rarely arrive as a curriculum. They arrive as a locked email account, a QR code, a school or benefits form, or a password that no longer works. Our Friday session on the rebooted DigitalLearn.org kept returning to a simple point: public libraries need a low-barrier tool for exactly these moments. Digital literacy starts with confidence, and confidence grows faster when instruction is short, plain, and ready to use.
The Case for Making a Mess
Sometimes, there is a session at a conference that resonates with you so deeply, you feel like throwing your hands up in the air, shouting YES YES YES, doing a dance, and high-fiving everyone around you. These are the sessions that make you remember why you LOVE what you do, and motivate you to keep going no matter the obstacles in your way. That is exactly what I felt when I attended #PLA26 session, You’ve Gotta Break a Few Eggs: The Case for Making a Mess, with Kenosha Public Library (KPL).
#PLA2026: Colson Whitehead on Genre, Persistence, and Writing Without Shortcuts
At the Author Lunch with Colson Whitehead, the conversation moved between reading, rejection, labor, and artificial intelligence. Whitehead spoke as an indoor child shaped by The Twilight Zone and speculative fiction, as a college student turned away from creative writing classes, and as a writer who built pages around a day job. For those of us in youth services, the lunch offered a useful frame for how reading and writing lives actually develop.
Presenting at #PLA2026
The other day I was browsing my inbox for an email and I found the initial email that I sent my colleague about collaborating for a presentation at PLA. It shocked me to see that that was nearly a year ago, when today we finally got to share our presentation with #PLA2026 attendees.
ALSC Blog at #PLA2026 – Wrap-up
Last week, from April 1st through the 3rd, a group of volunteer Conference Bloggers wrote personal reports from the 2026 Public Library Association Conference in Minnesota. The 28 posts published over those three days were widely read and appreciated. In addition, they were highlighted in the April 8th edition of American Libraries Direct: