Mississippi's Arab-Americans

Happy Arab-American Heritage Month! Did you know that members of the Arab ethnic group began immigrating to Mississippi in the 1870s? These people were mainly Christians from Lebanon and Syria and settled in Jackson, Meridian, railroad towns, and along the Mississippi River. According to the US Census, nearly 2,000 Arabs and people of Arab descent lived in Mississippi by the year 1930. Yalla Vote, a part of the Arab American Institute, estimates that over 11,000 Arab-Americans currently live in our state.

Reach Out and Dial Someone (@ Your Library)

Happy Telephone Day! Given the ubiquity of telephones in today's society, it can be hard to believe we ever survived without them. Amazingly, it's been less than 150 years since Alexander Graham Bell patented his telephone invention. While others also lay claim to the birth of this revolutionary device, the telephone, even as Bell knew it, has gone through innumerable changes since it first appeared in 1876. It's doubtful that he ever imagined a device that could call, send messages and letters, store tons of files, photos, and other information, and still fit in a pocket or a purse. While all those bells and whistles are fun and revolutionary, libraries have found unique ways to harness the power of a simple phone call in the service of literacy and information. 

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.