COVID-19 Resources: Social Distancing

Updated: April 29, 2020 Social distancing can help slow the spread of COVID-19 in affected communities. This means not shaking hands, avoiding crowds, standing at least 6 feet from other people … Continued




A Taste of Summer: Farm Market Season is Here!

The benefits to frequenting a farmer’s market are many: Fresh food (I’m talking food yanked right out of the ground or straight from the branch to the table where it’s sold), fair prices, the ability to support local businesses and farmers, and so much more!


Fight the Stigma: Books That Raise Awareness About Mental Health

Mental health includes our emotional, psychological and social well-being. We all experience various forms of mental health, and it’s only when you add terms such as “illness”, “problem” or “disorder” to the end of that phrase, that your awareness is shifted from well-being to something that needs to be fixed (or is beyond fixing).



Gene Luen Yang Challenges Us to Read Without Walls

I recently had the great pleasure of meeting award-winning author Gene Luen Yang during his Words and Pictures visit hosted by Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures. In addition to chatting with him in the green room about favorite manga, the joys of mentoring teens and how the heck metal fuses with glass (I had just come back from a road trip to the Corning Museum of Glass!), I was also able to ask him four library-related questions as well as introduce him to the stage!


Books, Glory, Awesomeness… How A YA Trivia Contest Reignited This Librarian’s Reading Fire

For those not in the know, Battle of the Books is like pub trivia without the booze, that instead focuses on a specific book list for each participating grade level, all while bringing TONS of teens from all over the city and county together in their love of reading (and the thrill of competition!). One of my favorite parts about this program is the collaboration that goes into suggesting book titles to make the final cut, which happens across the Library and even beyond Teen Services (teamwork makes the dream work!). And if you’re anything like me, you get to experience a new genre/author/writing style than what you might normally pick out for yourself to read.