As librarians and educators, improving our craft and choosing quality resources are two pieces of the career puzzle. If you want to learn how to use the best resources and how to find the best books, you often end up in one of Deborah Salyer’s many presentation.

Deborah Salyer is an international speaker with 30 years of experience in the classroom and school libraries. Deborah spent a handful of years in the bookseller market and professional development with Media Source.

She is currently the California TeachingBooks Implementation and Training Specialist, which brings her back to work with her former librarian colleagues. She is also a senior presenter with 21  years of experience at the Bureau of Education and Research. Her current seminar is the annual, What’s New in Children’s Books, K-6 where she travels across the country doing book reports.

You can register for her seminars at ⁠BER.org⁠. Contact her about your TeachingBooks access at ⁠dsalyer(at)overdrive.com (insert the @ symbol)⁠.

From the American Library Association on social media:

As #BannedBooksWeek kicks off, ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom has released new preliminary data documenting attempts to censor books, materials, and services in public, school, and academic libraries during the first eight months of 2024.

Between January 1 and August 31, 2024, ALA tracked 414 attempts to censor library materials and services. In those cases, 1,128 unique titles were challenged. In the same reporting period last year, ALA tracked 695 attempts with 1,915 unique titles challenged. Though the number of reports to date has declined in 2024, the number of documented attempts to censor books continues to far exceed the numbers prior to 2020.

Additionally, instances of soft censorship, where books are purchased but placed in restricted areas, not used in library displays, or otherwise hidden or kept off limits due to fear of challenges illustrate the impact of organized censorship campaigns on students’ and readers’ freedom to read. In some circumstances, books have been preemptively excluded from library collections, taken off the shelves before they are banned, or not purchased for library collections in the first place.

Read more: https://lnkd.in/d_QhXa6a

Margarita Engle is the Cuban-American author of books such as Enchanted Air, Drum Dream Girl, Dancing Hands, and The Surrender Tree, which received a Newbery Honor. She served as the national 2017-2019 Young People’s Poet Laureate. Other awards include Pura Belpré Medals, the Golden Kite Award, Walter Honors, Américas Awards, Jane Addams Award, PEN U.S.A., and NSK Neustadt Prize. Recent young adult verse novels include Wings in the Wild and Wild Dreamers. Recent picture books include Eloísa’s Musical Window and Water Day. Engle’s next verse novel is Island Creatures.

Margarita was born in Los Angeles, but developed a deep attachment to her mother’s homeland during childhood summers with relatives on the island.  She studied agronomy and botany along with creative writing, and now lives in central California with her entomologist husband and squirrel-chasing Border Collie.

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