Stacy Collins & Dr Yolanda Hood - Librarians In Conversation

Anastasia "Stacy" Collins (she/her/hers) holds an M.S. in LIS and an M.A. in Children's Literature, and is the Research & Instruction Librarian for Children's Literature and Social Work at the Simmons University Library. Outside of librarianship, Stacy is a children's literature scholar and reviewer as well as a trauma-informed facilitator with the Anti-Racism Collaborative of Massachusetts. She is the author of "Language, Power, and Oppression in the LIS Diversity Void," "The Cultural Doings and Undoings of the Sydney Taylor Book Award," and the Simmons Anti-Oppression Guide. Her work and scholarship centers the denaturalization and dismantling of systemic oppression in the intertwining fields of youth literature and librarianship. You can follow her online at @DarkLiterata.

Yolanda Hood, Ph.D., has been a librarian for sixteen years. She is currently the Metaliteracy and Student Engagement Librarian at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. Most of her years as a librarian were spent working in youth collections and curriculum materials centers in universities in the United States where she had the opportunity to provide programming for teens and outreach opportunities for universities. Although she has many research interests, her focus and most of her publications center on African American YA and Children's Literature. The project she is most proud of, however, is the diverse families database which helps identify books that depict the growing diversity of families. You can find the database at https://diversefamilies.org/ Yolanda is also the editor for Young Adult Library Services, a journal of the Young Adult Library Services Association which is a division of the American Library Association.