A Writer's Best Friend

Writers are essentially readers with secondary skills. I can’t imagine my life without libraries. Readers and writers would have emptied bank accounts and piled high cluttered homes filled with dusty books without them. Libraries allow me to test drive authors I’ve never read before. When a library buys an author’s book, the author may as well have won the lottery. Millions of readers, who are potential book buyers, can acquaint themselves with the author’s writing.


Sisters in Crime, an organization that promotes women crime writers, chose to sponsor and promote libraries through its 2010 “We Love Libraries Lottery,” a monthly drawing awarding one thousand dollars to libraries each month carrying Sister in Crime authors’ books. To enter the drawing, librarians submit a picture of books written by Sister in Crime members that the library has in its stacks to www.sistersincrime.org. The winners must use the award to buy more books for the library, not just its members’ books, but any books. Sisters in Crime also will exhibit at the upcoming American Library Association 2010 Annual Conference and Exhibition.

Washington, D. C.’s Convention Center will host the ALA’s 2010 conference. The event runs from June 24th to June 29th and features exhibits and speakers that the public may attend. There are three levels of attendance. Tickets for viewing exhibits only, costs $25. The Exhibits Plus ticket costs $35 and additionally provides access to the General Opening Session on Friday, June 25th, featuring speaker Toni Morrison, Pulitzer Prize winning author (Beloved). The public may also purchase the Exhibits Supreme ticket for $75 so that they may view all the exhibits and hear all speakers at the conference. Some of the speakers at the conference are:

• Nancy Pearl, NPR book commentator, and Mary McDonagh Murphy, Emmy award winning film maker and author of the book, Scout, Atticus and Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill A Mockingbird.

• Secret Life of Bees author Sue Kidd Monk and her daughter Ann Kidd Taylor promote their current book, Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter story.

• Sarah Duchess of York will speak about her new children’s series, Helping Hand books

• Founder of StoryCorps, a nonprofit oral history honoring the lives of everyday people, David Isay, talks on his latest book just released in April by Penguin Press, Mom: A Celebration of Mothers from StoryCorps. Isay has written four books about the audio series that has interviewed over fifty thousand people.

• Prominent enigmatologist (master of puzzles), Will Shortz has published over two hundred puzzle books and created the only enigmatology major at Indiana University. He is also the New York Times cross-word puzzle editor

• The Graphic Novel Panel includes David Small, who has illustrated over 40 books and written the memoir Stitches, which was nominated for a National Book Award

• Pulitzer Prize winning author Junot Diaz current project is a collection of short stories depicting the lives of Dominican-American immigrants entitled, Drown. He won the 2008 Pulitzer for, The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao.

E. B. Davis