LAPL Writes! Juggling a Library and Writing Career at the Same Time
Room 404A
Session 3
Join us for a discussion with LAPL staffers who are also published authors to learn about how they navigate two careers at the same time and how working at a library has informed their own work.
Moderator: Christina Rice has been with the Los Angeles Public Library since 2005 and is currently the Senior Librarian of the Photo Collection. She is the author of Ann Dvorak: Hollywood’s Forgotten Rebel (University Press of Kentucky) and is currently working on a biography of actress Jane Russell. She has been a writer on the My Little Pony (IDW Publishing) comic book series since 2014 and was a contributor to the Femme Magnifique and Where We Live anthologies.
Presenters:
Mary McCoy is the Senior Librarian in the Art, Music, & Recreation Department, and has worked for the Los Angeles Public Library since 2005. She is the author of Dead to Me (Disney-Hyperion), Camp So-and-So (Carolrhoda Lab), and most recently, I, Claudia (Carolrhoda Lab), which was a Junior Library Guild selection.
Catherine Pelonero joined the staff of LAPL in April of this year as an Office Trainee in Volunteer Engagement. Catherine is a true crime author and commentator. Her first book, Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences, was published in 2014 and became a New York Times bestseller. She appears on several true crime TV shows including A Crime to Remember, It Takes a Killer, and Murderous Affairs. Catherine’s latest book, Absolute Madness: A True Story of a Serial Killer, Race, and a City Divided, was published in November 2017 and was recently optioned for film.
Glen Creason has been the map librarian for the Los Angeles Public Library for the past twenty-nine years and a reference librarian in the History department since 1979. He was a co-curator of the landmark map exhibit “Los Angeles Unfolded” in 2009 and in October of 2010 he published the book “Los Angeles in Maps” for Rizzolli International. He has written about local history, maps and popular culture for local publications including the Downtown News, Mercators World, the International Map Collectors Society Journal, the Public Historian, the Communicator the Los Angeles Times and Edible Ojai. He blogged weekly on maps for 170 posts as a columnist for Los Angeles Magazine and is a contributor on research topics for the Huffington Post and LAist.
Erica Silverman has been with LAPL since 2006 and is currently the half-time Adult Librarian at the Silver Lake Library, where she facilitates a Life Story Writing workshop. She’s the author of over 30 picture books and early readers, including the Cowgirl Kate and Cocoa series (the first book was a Theodore Seuss Geisel Honor book), Sholom’s Treasure: How Sholom Aleichem Became a Writer (Sydney Taylor Award), Don’t Fidget a Feather, (California Young Reader Medal) and Big Pumpkin, a perennial Halloween favorite with the preschool set. Her most recent books include Wake Up, City, and the Lana’s World early reader series. Her newest picture book, (launching October 9) is Jack, (Not Jackie), in which big sister Susan learns to understand and accept that her younger sibling identifies as Jack rather than Jackie.