A child can be celebrated at home and still lose confidence in a school hallway. Billy Porter’s ALA Annual Main Stage appearance featured Songbird in the Light, written by Porter with Chris Clarkson and illustrated by Charly Palmer. The picture book follows a child whose voice is loved at home, mocked at school, and strengthened through the encouragement of a choir teacher. The conference program described the book as a story about learning to love yourself.
Tag: youth services
#ALAAC26: Dr. Jill Biden and the Door Before the Answer
Dr. Jill Biden’s ALA Annual conversation offered a youth-services reminder. A young person may need the library before feeling ready to enter.
#ALAAC26: Rachel Maddow and How Young Readers Meet the Record
A child’s question about history can sound simple. What happened? The harder question follows immediately. How do we know? At the ALA Annual 2026 Opening Session, Rachel Maddow returned to the second question. In a conversation that moved between information access and historical research, she connected democratic participation with reliable information about the present. She described her own work as dependent on librarians and archivists who preserve records and keep them available for later discovery.
#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.
Interviewing Library Advocates – Stephanie Smallwood, Youth Services Coordinator for the Springfield Greene County Library District
Interview with Stephanie Smallwood, Youth Services Coordinator for the Springfield Greene County Library District discussing various ways to advocate for early literacy and libraries.
Building Partnerships from Worry and Good Will
This is not the blog post I imagined writing when I signed up to do it months ago. And I am pretty confident in assuming that your work lives and professional aspirations are also significantly altered. In addition to trying to stay healthy or recovering from this deadly virus, many of us are furloughed, nervous about our next paycheck or capacity to work, or embarking on work we never imagined would be part of our day. It also may not seem like the time for developing partnerships. Or reading a blog post about developing partnerships. However, as we rebuild and recreate how we serve our communities, while also trying to remember what day of the week it is, other organizations and entities are also in the process of reimagining how they can start back up. And none of us has enough resources to cover all of the needs. Now more…
Why Children’s Librarians Should Run the World (or at least the library)
I’ve been thinking about leadership a lot lately as the Managing Children’s Services Committee has played a role in the ALSC Mentoring Program. I’m always blown away by the quality of people we have working in the children’s department, and equally surprised that we don’t have even more children’s librarians who are moving up into management positions.