Meet a winner of the national I Love My Librarian Award
Nominations are now open through September 20 for the 2010 Carnegie Corporation of New York/New York Times I Love My Librarian Award. The award really is a big deal: up to 10 librarians in public, school, college, community college and university libraries nationwide will win $5,000 and be honored at an award reception in New York, hosted by The New York Times.
The 2010 winners will be announced in December. In the meantime, let’s take a look back at previous years’ winners. Here is Lucy Hansen, a Texas school librarian who won the award in 2009.
Lucy Hansen
South Texas Independent School District
Mercedes, Texas
No other nomination of the 3,200 received in 2009 demonstrates the power of librarians to positively impact an individual’s life like one submitted for Lucy Hansen. Nereyda Esparza, a former student of Lucy’s, writes, “Lucy Hansen has not only been a strong mentor in my life, but also a voice of comfort, compassion and strength in my hardest times…When I was happy she knew, when I wasn’t she helped, when I was stumped, I called or emailed her. This spring, when I found out I had been accepted to study at Oxford University, the first person I called was Lucy.” But her focus is not on one student alone. Lucy is helping to raise health literacy levels in the lower Rio Grande Valley of South Texas through a National Library of Medicine program that that recruits student volunteers to perform outreach and peer tutoring to medically underserved populations.
