Dear Librarian,

In this month’s newsletter, we highlight the relationship between librarians and authors with a special essay by librarian and USA Today bestselling author, Amanda Flower.

Libraries and Authors

By Amanda Flower

Libraries have been a central part of my world my whole life. As a young child, I went to story time every week, and as I grew older, weekly trips to at least three libraries were standard for my whole family. I loved libraries so much that when I was sixteen I got my first job as a shelver and worked continually in one library or another, earning my MLIS along the way, until I finally left the profession to write full time at age thirty-eight. Taking into account how most of my life was lived in a library, it's hard to pick one best memory, so I will share a group of them.

When I was a public librarian at the end of my career, my greatest joy was taking patrons to the mystery section and sharing all my favorite authors. Seeing the patrons' faces light up when I found them the perfect book to read felt a little bit like being a fairy godmother, and hearing their excitement about the book later when they came back was just as special. I think that's why a lot of us get into the library profession because we want to bring people joy and help them find the perfect book. And librarians are most definitely fairy godmothers and godfathers in my mind.

Amanda Flower is a USA Today bestselling and Agatha Award-winning author of over thirty-five mystery novels. In addition to being an author, Amanda served as a librarian for fifteen years in Northeast Ohio before turning to writing full time. She and her husband, a recording engineer, own a recording studio and small farm. When she is not writing, she can be found gardening or photographing the wild birds on her farm.

Focus On Libraries: WorldCat 

By Susan Hammerman

I though a good place to start for the first entry in this brand new section of the WLL Newsletter would be a quick description of WorldCat (https://www.worldcat.org/). WorldCat is the best source to use when you want to find library materials, including archival and manuscript materials. It is the world’s largest library catalog with library records from approximately 15,600 libraries in 107 countries. You can search it for free. Search by title or author or use an advanced search to limit by criteria such as publication year, format, or language. Some items are downloadable too. WorldCat is the resource to use when you want to know which libraries have original manuscripts written by Agatha Christie, postcards and letters written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a first edition of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, or you want to find out how many public libraries own Amanda Flower’s most recent novel, Farm to Trouble. The answer — a lot.  

Susan Hammerman, a former rare book librarian, is the coordinator of the We Love Libraries program. She lives in Chicago and writes neo-noir and crime short stories.

Sisters in Crime $500 Grant for Libraries

Don’t forget to enter your library for one of the $500 Doris Ann Norris We Love Libraries grants. SinC runs the program as a lottery – all you have to do is fill out an easy online form. It’s the easiest grant you’ll never write!

Thank you for all you do for your communities.

Happy spring and happy reading,

Shari Randall

Sisters in Crime Library Liaison

Sisters in Crime hosts LIVE webinars each month. Webinars last 60-90 minutes depending on the topic and the audience questions! These webinars are open to all.

We've started to collect information about our members books. We've put it in a spreadsheet that we'll update every month, and send as part of this newsletter. This is a new feature for our members, so the list will expand. But in the meantime, we hope you find this list helpful.

Looking for diverse books? For many years, SINC has curated Frankie’s List, an extensive list of crime novels by people of color and other marginalized groups. Frankie Y. Bailey, building on work by the late Eleanor Taylor Bland, began to compile a list of published Black crime writers over a decade ago. Frankie has expanded the list to include other WOC and LGBTQ+ authors. Here’s a link: https://www.sistersincrime.org/page/FrankiesList

The Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award is a $2000 prize for an emerging crime writer of color. Submissions are open through May15. 

Please send any eligible writers you know the link!

Sisters in Crime is the premier crime writing association focused on equity and inclusion in our community and in publishing. Our 4,500+ members enjoy access to tools to help them learn, grow, improve, thrive, and reinvent if necessary. They also gain a community of supportive fellow writers and readers, both peers to share the peaks and valleys of writing, and mentors to model the way forward.