This summer I assisted Professor Colette Cann with the expansion of the Education Department’s children’s book library, taking on the distinct task of enlarging and enriching the department’s collection of literature for and about youth of color. For our project, Professor Cann and I focused in particular on collecting literature about Black girls and young women. With the assistance of professor emerita Joyce Bickerstaff, I also helped plan the next installment of Vassar’s Bechtel Lecture Series, to be given this fall by celebrated children’s book author Andrea Davis Pinkney. In honor of her continued commitment to the study of children’s literature at Vassar and beyond, we decided to name the new book collection—the opening of which will be officially announced at the time of the Bechtel Lecture—the Joyce D. Bickerstaff Black Girls’ Lives Matter Collection.

Much of my time this summer was spent researching and cataloging a list of books that center on, celebrate, or complicate narratives about Black girls and young women to be adopted into the library. I also assisted Professor Bickerstaff with the retrieval of several hundred books from storage which now form a significant portion of the library’s overall collection; many of these books have been incorporated into the Black Girls’ Lives Matter Collection as well. With the help of the staff at Poughkeepsie’s Three Arts Bookstore, even more books were purchased for the Black Girls’ Lives Matter Collection, which now totals at nearly 400 titles.

Beginning in November, the Black Girls’ Lives Matter Collection will serve as the booklist for the inaugural season of the department’s new Pop-Up Library Program. Subdivided into groupings of 30 books organized around different themes, it will visit and live with participating Poughkeepsie elementary school classrooms for month-long periods at a time, to be used by teachers and students as they wish. Through this program, we hope the collection—and all future collections adopted as Pop-Up Library booklists—will function as an exciting and readily accessible resource for the development of literacy skills and racial awareness in local youth.

The Dome Room in the Maria Mitchell Observatory has been completely reorganized to make way for the growing collection, and all the titles that make up the newly expanded library will be easily searchable through an online catalog that will launch this fall—along with the opening of the library and the commencement of the Pop-Up Library Program—to coincide with Andrea Davis Pinkney’s delivery of the Bechtel Lecture on November 3rd. The Bechtel Lecture Series, which was established in 1990 to honor prominent figures in the field of children’s literature, is open to the entire Vassar community and the larger Poughkeepsie community of which we are a part. We hope you will all attend!

Along with Professor Cann and Professor Bickerstaff, the work I completed this summer would not have been possible without the guidance and assistance of Gretchen Lieb, Heidy Berthoud, Dayle Rebelein, Julie Riess, Andrea Davis Pinkney, Scottie Bowditch, and Walter Effron. Thank you!