Bio

I’m proud to be a third-generation librarian, carrying on a family tradition of sharing books and connecting people to information. I was born in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and raised in Kansas City. I graduated from Vassar College with a BA in history and women’s studies and from the University of Iowa with master’s degrees in history and library science. While in graduate school I primarily studied and taught African American and women’s history. I worked in Washington, D.C., as a librarian and archivist at ProQuest, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress (Civil Rights History Project), the office of U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), and at the Arizona Historical Society in Tucson. I am now a Project Archivist at the Arizona State Museum at the University of Arizona, working on the Doris Duke Native Oral History Revitalization Project until the end of 2022.

In 2011, I was invited by my coworker at the Library of Congress, Peter Bartis, to an estate sale of a librarian named Ruth Rappaport, another longtime LC employee who had retired in 1993. Intrigued by the stories that Ruth (and her friends and coworkers) told about her incredible life, I set out on my own adventure to uncover how this woman healed herself with books in times of trauma and renewed her life through librarianship.

I’m represented by Priya Doraswamy at Lotus Lane Literary; please contact the agency at contact@lotuslit.com for all book related queries. Follow me on Twitter @katievenae.