Carmen Agra Deedy Named Spokesperson for School Library Media Month
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Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 3/19/2008 2:15:00 PM
Award-winning author Carmen Agra Deedy has spent the last two decades writing and telling stories. Now she has another opportunity to spread her love of reading: as national spokesperson for this year’s School Library Media Month, celebrated in April. Deedy talks to SLJ about her plans for this new role—and where her fascination with
libraries comes from. What are your plans as spokesperson for School Library Media Month?
The plans have mostly been arranged for me, thank goodness! I'll be taping public service announcements, engaging in media interviews, and making appearances at libraries. But wherever I go, I will continue touting my firmly held belief that school libraries are critical to the development of a literate and intellectually vigorous school environment. If I might paraphrase an old political adage, "As goes the library, so goes the school!"
How did you happen to land this role?
I was contacted, through my publishers, by AASL. I travel extensively as an author, and the busy spring calendar will work in our favor in this respect. When I speak at schools throughout the month of April, I will invoke my love of libraries and reiterate how critical the role of the library is as the "beating heart of learning" within the school.
Where does your love of libraries come from?
I have loved libraries since childhood, when I fell in love with Charlotte's Web; Elwyn Brooks White never knew of the gift he gave a skinny refugee kid, who was also a slow reader. Once I devoured the works of E.B. White, no book was safe. I gobbled them up like potato chips. The marvelous librarian in Decatur, Georgia, my hometown at the time, shamelessly encouraged my biblioholism, by introducing me to title after glorious title. Bless Mary MacDonald.
Have your numerous author visits influenced your views on school libraries?
In schools where the library is considered central to the educational development of the students, you find an almost palpable vibrancy: everywhere you look, people are reading and learning. As soon as you enter, you notice the library is alive, organic—there is a constant flux of teachers looking for materials for their latest unit of study, students browsing books, and parent volunteers shelving and doing general yeoman's service. It takes a village to fully experience and run a library.
What inspires the stories in your writing?
I cull stories (and this is not unique to me, of course) from my own archive of memories, my observations of the world around me, and from my own imagination.
Did the idea for The Library Dragon (Peachtree, 1996), about a fire-breathing school librarian, come from personal experience?
She lives and breathes—and that's all you're getting.
What’s in the works now?
I've just finished a manuscript that was inspired by an incident I read about in the New York Times, in the spring of 2002. A young Kenyan, Kimeli Naiyomah, and his Maasai tribe were moved to offer the people of the United States fourteen cows, as a gift of healing.
I've since come to know Mr. Naiyomah, and I'm excited that he has agreed to write an afterword to the book. Thus far, it has been a remarkable experience, and I am very much looking forward to the book's publication.
