I grew up in Texas, and while you may not hear my accent unless we talk over the phone or meet in person, it’s still there.

I decided I wanted to be a librarian when I was 12, and have never looked back! It’s been a wonderful ride and a wonderful (although not particularly lucrative) career, with many twists, turns, and changes along the way.

I graduated from Texas Woman’s University with a BA in English and a BS in LS in 1969. I worked for a year as a children’s librarian in Albuquerque, NM, in a very small branch library, and decided I wanted to be a YA librarian. So I wrote to the Dean of the Library School at TWU and told her that she’d been right. If I wanted to be a YA librarian, and I did, I would have to get a MLS. In 1971 I did, and began my professional career in Santa Rosa, CA as a YA/Reference Librarian. While I was there I joined the Bay Area Young Adult Librarians (BAYA) and began reviewing for School Library Journal, in their “Adult Books for Young Adults” column. In 1973, I became the first Regional YA Librarian hired by Alameda County Library in Fremont, CA. That first fall after I moved, one dark and stormy night I read an unbound galley of what Gina Minudri (she was the editor of the column I wrote for and Asst. Dir of ACO) said was “just a little high school horror story, nothing major.” I scared myself to death that night, and slept with the lights on. The next day I wrote the first published review of a new author, a fellow named Stephen King. The book, of course, was Carrie.

I continued to work at ACO and write for SLJ until 1978, when I moved to Stanislaus County Free Library, in Modesto, CA, as a YA Coordinator. While I was in Modesto, I began to do workshops on how to write and perform booktalks, and before I left in May, 1979, I had written the first book on the subject. I went back to Denton and to TWU to get a Ph.D. in LS. My original plan was to become a bibliotherapist specializing in working with teens and their families. Along the way I picked up a master’s degree in psychology, confounding professors in that department who didn’t see how being a psychologist and a librarian could ever work. Made perfect sense to me then and still does!

While I was in Denton, I did a lot of things to support myself. Some of them were more or less run-of-the-mill: teaching assistant, research assistant, visiting professor, publisher’s representative. Some were more esoteric: adolescent therapist, family therapist, business manager for a residential treatment center, and last but certainly never least, taxi and airport limo driver! Then in the early part of 1983, I spotted an ad in American Libraries, advertising a position at Emporia State University, and including the magic words, psychology, children, young adult, literature/services. I was the last applicant, and the one they chose. I spent the next seven years in Kansas, teaching on campus, by video, and in the Iowa and Colorado distance learning programs.

I also published several more books and a videotape on booktalking, began “The BookTalker,” an insert in the now-defunct Wilson Library Bulletin, edited the journal for the children and young adult divisions of ALA, called Top of the News when I first began, and Journal of Youth Services in Libraries after its name was changed, and wrote reviews and Booktalks for the new YA reviewing source, Voice of Youth Advocates. I also got married and divorced, and decided I preferred the big city to small towns, packed up myself and my three cats, and left for Denver and the Rocky Mountains. I was there for 16 years, longer than I’d ever lived anyplace.

I did lots of different things to support myself. I wrote books on booktalking and YA lit, I did lectures and workshops on all facets of YA literature, the psychology of censorship, RA, and many other topics. I was a half time RA/Reference librarian for DPL for ten years, taught in the Department of Library Science at the University of Denver for 12 years and in the School of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University for almost 4 years, wrote web published booktalks for Scholastic, wrote reviews for The Romance Reader online, and did whatever else seemed to fit into my schedule at the moment.

Then in 2006, everything changed when I was appointed as a full-time faculty member in the SJSU library school.  I now live in San Jose across the street from a local brewery, just minutes from the campus, and am gradually getting settled in. 

I will be teaching a variety of youth librarianship courses, collection development, and hope to introduce some new courses I taught at DU and ESU.  I am also planning to replicate my dissertation next year, hoping to prove, once and for all, what I have always known from anecdotal evidence—booktalking does change attitude toward reading.  I’m also finishing Radical Reads 2 and writing articles for various sources.  And best of all, I am back in the Bay Area, ending my career in the same place I started it.  It feels wonderful to have come full circle, somehow, and yet be in an entirely new and very exciting place.  So to all of you Californians who knew me in the 70s, I’m BA-AACK!!