Congratulations to Nancy Pearl!

I’m excited to give a special shout out to friend, mentor, and librarian extraordinaire Nancy Pearl, who was just named Librarian of the Year by the Library Journal! As the article making the announcement states, “No one other than Nancy Pearl has so convinced Americans that libraries, books, and reading are critical to our communities. Her passionate advocacy has done that nationwide for thousands of individual readers and library workers in the trenches at the local level.”

I first met Nancy while writing my book In Their Shoes, as she was one of the 50 amazing women I profiled. We met up for tea and a pastry at a cafe in the Eastlake neighborhood of Seattle and she told me about her career journey. What I found most inspirational about Nancy is that she followed her passion – books and reading – and in doing so made an indelible mark on the world of books, fostering millions of readers along the way. Though Nancy worked as a librarian for many years, since retiring she has written multiple books about books, frequently contributes to NPR and other radio programs, and speaks all of the country about the subject she loves most. Nancy reminded me that no matter what your passion is – be it reading or photography or working with people or engineering – with creativity and drive you can create the career of your dreams.

Here are some highlights from my interview with Nancy that’s featured in In Their Shoes:

Me: You knew you wanted to be a librarian from the time you were 10 years old. What is it about being a librarian that appealed to you?

Nancy: I came from a family of do-gooders, people who really believed that you could change the world and make it a better place. And for me, the way that I understood even at 10 that you could make the world a better place was by being a librarian, especially a children’s librarian, and opening up the world of books and reading to kids who might be in unfortunate home situations or in other difficult places in their lives. Books have that unique ability in that you can both lose yourself and find yourself in the pages of the same book.

Me: So now reflecting back, did you achieve your goal?

Nancy: Yes, I do think that librarians make the world a better place. A librarian is not solely a person who retrieves information – the public library is really the heart and soul of a community. I think that through recommending good books to read or through programming that they do, librarians make a library a living, breathing place.

Me: Do you make a distinction between your work and your personal life?

Nancy: Robert Frost has a poem in which he talks about when love and work are one, and I think that should be the goal. I’ve been fortunate enough that there’s never been a separation between what I do in my work and what I would choose to do if I weren’t in this job. I guess that’s one result of knowing at age ten what I wanted to do. I’ve always just loved to read and escape into the pages of a book.

Congratulations on this honor, Nancy!