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NEW LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS: U.S. Senate Confirms first woman and first African American as Librarian of Congress

Dr. Carla Hayden (b. 1953), Librarian of Congress
Dr. Carla Hayden (b. 1953), Librarian of Congress effective Sept. 30, 2016

The United States Senate vote of 74-18 confirmed Dr. Carla D. Hayden, longtime chief executive of the Enoch Pratt Free Library system in Baltimore and a former president of the American Library Association, as the 14th Librarian of Congress, for a renewable ten-year term.

Dr. Hayden was nominated by President Barack Obama in February.

This is truly a great honor to be nominated by President Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to lead the nation’s library, the Library of Congress,” Dr. Hayden said. “It has been my privilege to serve the citizens of Baltimore for 23 years and help restore the Enoch Pratt Free Library as a world-renowned institution. I look forward to working with the dedicated staff of the Library of Congress. I will be honored to build on the legacy and accomplishments of my predecessors in this position, to be part of a continuing movement to open the treasure chest that is the Library of Congress even further and to make it a place that can be found and used by everyone.”

Dr. Hayden is the first woman, and the first African American, to serve as chief executive of the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world, with 162 million items in its collections. It also oversees the U.S. Copyright Office and the Congressional Research Service. It serves Congress and makes its research collections accessible on site and online.

She takes the helm from Acting Librarian David S. Mao, who has served since the retirement of Dr. James H. Billington on September 30, 2015. She will be sworn in at a date to be determined and is expected to assume her duties soon.

Dr. Hayden has recently overseen the renovation of the central branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, a four-year, $112 million project, and has also led $40 million in renovations to other units within the 22-branch Pratt system. The system is named for the businessman and philanthropist who financed its founding in 1886.

She took the helm of the Baltimore system in 1993, winning strong praise for her work to ensure that the city’s library system offers a broad array of services to assist citizens from all walks of life, from access to books and other learning materials to computer access and job information. A program of outreach into neighborhoods served by the Pratt libraries included after-school centers for teens, offering homework assistance and college counseling; a program offering healthy-eating information for residents in areas with insufficient access to high-quality food; programming in Spanish; establishment of an electronic library, and digitization of the Library’s special collections.

Dr. Hayden won high praise, during recent civil unrest in some Baltimore neighborhoods, for keeping library branches open citywide to continue service and provide citizens with safe havens.

Dr. Hayden first served as a children’s librarian in the Chicago Public Library system, eventually rising to the post of deputy commissioner and chief librarian in that system. She also taught Library and Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh. She received Library Journal’s 1995 Librarian of the Year Award, and served as president of the American Library Association 2003-2004.

Dr. Hayden received a B.A. from Roosevelt University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the Graduate Library School of the University of Chicago.

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The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library, offering access to the creative record of the United States – and extensive materials from around the world – both on site and online. It is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office. Explore collections, reference services and other programs and plan a visit at loc.gov, access the official site for U.S. federal legislative information at congress.gov and register create works of authorship at copyright.gov.

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GEORGE CARLIN on the dangers of euphemisms

George Carling (1937-2008)
George Carlin (1937-2008)

Imprecise language is misleading and our job as poets and writers is to tell it like it is. Here, George Carlin (1937-2008), American counter-culture stand-up comedian, social critic, philosopher, satirist, actor and writer, shows us just how  unjust, confusing – and often just plain silly – euphemism is.

VIEWER ALERT: Carlin’s vocabulary will offend some people.

Photo courtesy of Alex Lozupone under CC BY-SA 4.0 license

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LATE-BREAKING NEWS: Lifting the Veil, Artists in Support of The Tahirih Justice Center

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The Tahirih Justice Center stands alone as the only national, multi-city organization providing a broad range of direct legal services, policy advocacy, and training and education to protect immigrant women and girls fleeing violence. Come out and support some of New York’s most powerful artists as they perform to raise money for a worth cause. $10 suggested donation all going to the center. Thanks to Terri Muuss for sharing this with us. Lifting the Veil Facebook Page is HERE.

August 7 at 4 p.m. – 8 p.m. EDT at BrickHouse Bewery & Restaurant 67 W. Main Street, Patchogue, New York 11772.  

*****

a man, a woman, a stick

(1921)

the stick stood in the corner of the kitchen
a constant threat; stoking, as it was meant to,
chronic intimidation

he had a man’s right to deliver his blows
to vent his anger and his self-contempt
to cause suffering for the insufferable

someone had to make it up to him,
his loss-of-face to race, creed and poverty

for her part, eve’s daughter was ripe,
shamed by her intrinsic sinfulness,
worn by her constant pregnancies

her femininity: tired and task-bound,
guilt flowing freely, as all-consuming as lava

[relief, only in death]

and the seventh child was born to die
and the man was demanding his bread

she wrapped the girl in swaddling cloth,
placed her gently by the stove, and
while the newborn made busy with dying,
the woman prepared him his meal

© 2015, Jamie Dedes

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CELEBRATING AMERICAN SHE-POETS (#22): Jane Hirshfield, a human poet

Jane Hirshfeld (b. 1953), poet, essayist, translator
Jane Hirshfield (b. 1953), poet, essayist, translator

I always feel a slight dismay if I’m called a “Zen” poet. I am not. I am a human poet, that’s all.” Poet Jane Hirshfield on the Mystery of Existence, Spirituality & Health Magazine, Mar./Apr. 2013

When I think of Jane Hirshfield, I think first of her kindness to my friend, Bay Area poet, Ann Emerson (poet #9 in this series), who died a few years back and who received compassionate and generous guidance from Jane at a conference some years ago. It meant a lot to Ann and was a high-point in her six-year journey through cancer with poetry. Once having read Jane Hirshfield’s work, you can’t conceive of her as being anything but kind. The empathy expressed in her poetry is vast.

I admit to being one of those who also thinks of her as a Buddhist poet. Her poetry is Zen-like in its attentiveness, its inward-looking meditative quality, a quality of the ineffable given expression. Jane Hirshfield is a Zen practitioner, lived for several years at Tassajara and is ordained in Soto Zen.

Immersion in the life of the world, a willingness to be inhabited by and to speak for others, including those beyond the realm of the human, these are the practices not just of the bodhisattva but of the writer.” Jane Hirshfield in Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

Another New York girl who eventually migrated to the San Francisco Bay Area, Jane Hirshfield was famously graduated from Princeton University’s first class to include women. She is the author of eight collections including The Lives of the Heart (Harper Collins, 1997), which won the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award and Given Sugar, Given Salt: Poems.

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TREE

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books —

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

– ©Jane Hirshfield (from Given Sugar, Given Salt, Poems)

Originality requires the aptitude for exile.” The Question of Originality in Nine Gates

Her two collections of essays (must reads, no pedantry here) are Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (Harper Perennial, 1998) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Knopf, 2015). She also translated a collection of poems by Japanese women with Mariko Aratani: The ink dark moon : love poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, women of the ancient Court of Japan (Vintage Classics). Her study The Heart of Haiku is available in Kindle Edition.

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Reading Jane Hishfield’s work is both a joy and education for your writerly self and a balm for your spirit. If by some incalculable misfortune you haven’t met her yet, seize this day.

© 2016, words, Jamie Dedes; photograph by A. Phillips and generously released into the public domain