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Category: Literacy

Color portrait photo of Meg Medina, smiling at camera. She has shoulder-length brown hair, frame glasses and is wearing a black turtleneck and a dark green sweater

Meet Meg Medina, the Library’s New Ambassador for Young People’s Literature

Posted by: Leah Knobel

Meg Medina, a writer whose work explores how culture and identity intersect through the eyes of children and young adults, today was named as the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature for 2023-2024, the Library of Congress and Every Child a Reader announced. Medina, a Cuban-American, is the eighth author to hold the position and the first …

Image of an ornate clock showing 2:05 with sculpted male figures sitting on each side of the clock face

Inquiring Minds: Author Takes a Deep Dive into the Library

Posted by: Wendi Maloney

Barb Rosenstock writes children’s books about people who have changed history — Ben Franklin, Theodore Roosevelt, Joe DiMaggio and racing legend Louise Smith among them. “The Noisy Paint Box,” her story about the artist Kandinsky, was a 2015 Caldecott Honor Book. In 2013, she published “Thomas Jefferson Builds a Library” about Jefferson’s massive book collection, …

Image of an ornate clock showing 2:05 with sculpted male figures sitting on each side of the clock face

Crowdsourcing Helps to Unlock the Mystery of Cursive

Posted by: Wendi Maloney

This is a guest post by Julie Miller, a historian in the Manuscript Division, and Victoria Van Hyning, a senior innovation specialist in the division. This post coincides with National Handwriting Day. “That’s so beautiful, but what does it say?” This is what we often hear from visitors to the Library of Congress when they …

Image of an ornate clock showing 2:05 with sculpted male figures sitting on each side of the clock face

My Job at the Library: Cataloging Children’s Literature

Posted by: Wendi Maloney

This interview with Ann Sullivan was first published in the September–October issue of LCM, the Library of Congress magazine. The issue is available in its entirety online. After reading the interview, make sure to take the quiz that follows! How would you describe your work? I catalog children’s books at the Library of Congress. This …

Image of an ornate clock showing 2:05 with sculpted male figures sitting on each side of the clock face

Letters About Literature: A Life-Changing Book

Posted by: Wendi Maloney

This is a guest blog post by Maya Mau, a 10th-grade student at West Windsor–Plainsboro High School North in Plainsboro Township, New Jersey. She is a national winner of the 2017–18 Letters About Literature contest, a reading and writing competition for students in grades four through 12 that involves reading a work and writing to …