It's a Poetry Party!

April is National Poetry Month, which makes it an ideal time to go to your bookshelves and pick out your favorite verse, sonnet, ballad, haiku, or limerick. Predating modern history, poetry stands as one of the earliest forms of artistic expression with the Epic of Gilgamesh being one of the oldest recorded poems dating to circa 2100 BCE. With poetry being so essential to our history, it’s of no surprise that no matter where you go you can find rich, poetic traditions in any place or culture, including Mississippi. With such an abundant and rich literary history, Mississippi no less offers its own voices to the poetic craft, including works from the likes of Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, and Tennessee Williams, as well as other unique voices such as Etheridge Knight, Charles Henri Ford, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil. You'll find some suggestions of local Mississippi poets below, as well as a breakdown of poetry styles.

Read With MLC: Celebrity Memoirs

Welcome to April, and the fourth reading prompt for our 2024 Read With MLC reading challenge: read a celebrity memoir. Is there anything more delicious than escaping your own life to peer into the intricacies of someone else's? Affairs, addiction, divorce, abuse... seeing how others deal with adversity somehow makes our own more manageable. Add in the shiny gloss of reading a tell-all book about someone famous? You can see why celebrity memoirs are a booming business. 

If you look at the past five years, the top US sales slots go to famous people from a variety of backgrounds. In 2020, Barack Obama's A Promised Land sold 17 million copies. He was closely followed by Prince Harry's Spare, with 16 million copies, Michelle Obama's Becoming, with 14 million copies, and Britney Spears's The Woman in Me, with 11 million copies. And these are figures for just the first week of sales! If you're wondering which memoirs your local librarian liked as opposed to national sales figures, you need look no further than below this graphic!

Total Eclipse of the Sun

Hear ye, hear ye! There is a total solar eclipse happening on April 8th, 2024, the last total eclipse for 20 years. According to timeanddate.com, Jackson, Mississippi, will experience approximately 90% totality at 1:52 p.m. In celebration of this momentous occasion, I wanted to share what MLC has done to help public libraries, and therefore all Mississippians, enjoy this event. 

The WPA Files: Fewer Aliens, More Gossip

Have you ever wanted to learn more about your town? Do you like gossip and facts about trees? You need to check out the WPA files! WPA stands for Works Progress Administration, which was organized as part of the New Deal to provide jobs for unemployed Americans during the Great Depression. One of the projects of the WPA was to gather local histories by going into each county, interviewing the residents, and compiling research. MLC has files for all of Mississippi’s counties except for Sharkey and Wilkinson. The source material for these files can be found at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. 

I Am Woman, Hear Me Write

It's Women's History Month. Quick! Name your favorite female Mississippi author!

There are a slew of wonderfully talented authoresses hailing from our great state and they have written (and continue to write!) in a number of genres: romance, mystery, biography, and more. Whatever your preferred reading style is, these women have covered it. Sometimes, though, it feels like they're overshadowed by the Faulkners and Grishams in the state. According to an article published by the website Quartz, only 18% of published authors in the 1960s were women. Fast-forward sixty years to 2020--a new study proclaims that women have surpassed men in book field, now publishing more than 50% of the written word. Whether or not this study was sound methodologically, it points to the fact that women writers in Mississippi and world-wide have come a long, long way.

Read with MLC: Graphic Nonfiction

Welcome to March and the third reading prompt of our 2024 Read with MLC challenge: read a work of graphic nonfiction. Nonfiction comics have been around for longer than you might think. Thomas Nast, who created political cartoons, started drawing as a teen in 1856. The Republican elephant was one of the artistic brainchildren of his decades-long career. He brought other popular figures to the forefront of American consciousness, figures just as beloved and enduring as, say, Superman, like the Democratic donkey, Uncle Sam, and Santa Claus. Robert Ripley and his Ripley's Believe It or Not franchise started in 1918 as a single panel comic and grew to encompass a wealth of researchers to back up his claims. There are many more examples, here in America and across the world. While fiction comics dominate the reading landscape, there is a wide world of graphic nonfiction available that has literally exploded onto our reading shelves. If you have a thirst for knowledge and a love of art, this may be the perfect type of book for you.

So... Just what is available out there? I scanned our shelves for some of our top graphic reads and found some in an array of subject areas that are sure to tickle your nonfiction reading taste buds.

Clay-ke It to the Limit

MLC’s Craft Club had its sixth meeting in February. We tested MLC’s polymer clay kit and let out our inner sculptors. Attendees had the option to create earrings or design their own sculptures. The earrings didn’t work quite as planned: MLC’s main meeting room was in the middle of a technology makeover and we couldn't use the projection equipment. It is much easier to have people create something with an example, so most of the attendees chose to make their own sculptures. They turned out great!