Celebrity Librarian Nancy Pearl to inspire readers on the Palouse

Librarians are nuts about Nancy Pearl.  The only librarian to have her own action figure, she truly is the superhero of our field.  Sharing her expertise in connecting people to books and her love of reading all over the nation, we are all a bit in awe of the fact that she has made having “Book Lust,” well, something to be proud of.

I have had the honor to hear Nancy Pearl speak in person.  It was in the fall of 2008, I was five months pregnant, and I was at a point in my career where I had begun to forget why I had become a librarian in the first place.  I had decided that after my daughter was born I would do something else—maybe go to school to get a degree in some other field, or maybe go back to teaching.  I vaguely remembered being in grad school and feverishly talking about how public libraries are the great social equalizer and the cornerstone of democracy and all of the other things you tell people to explain why you want to devote your life to working in a field that is seen by far too many as ancillary instead of essential.  But it all felt very distant to me by then, and I no longer felt that what I was doing was as important as I once thought it was.


Nancy was the keynote speaker at my library system’s staff training day that year.  She did not talk about libraries being the cornerstone of democracy.  She didn’t even talk about how important it is for all citizens to have equal access to information.  Instead, she told us a story from her childhood, and how she came to fall in love with libraries.  She told us about the library branch she had visited every day as a child.  She told us about the librarian who introduced her to the adult novels after she had voraciously read all of the children’s novels.  She told us that libraries, and librarians, changed her life.  And as she told the story, she changed mine.

Since then, I have heard Nancy Pearl speak many times on NPR.  She encourages me to try books that I would not normally think of trying—that I might not even hear of were it not for her.  And as I listen, I think to myself, “I can do that too.”  I may not be able to paint as beautiful a picture with words as Nancy can, and I certainly am not reaching as many readers as Nancy is, but every reader I talk to, every connection I make with a patron, changes me and the patron forever.  And if that’s not important, I don’t know what is.

I encourage you to come hear Nancy Pearl for yourself on April 11th at 6 p.m.  I can’t promise it will change your life in the way it changed mine, but I can promise it will inspire you to read and to share with other readers.  I will be there, listening, making connections, and loving every minute of being a librarian.

by Cheryl Brinkley

Adult Services Librarian