I was so honored to be invited to lead a workshop on Manga 101 at this year's School Library Journal Summit in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This was such a great experience with some awesome Library leaders! I highly encourage y'all to submit a request to go to this conference in the future.
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In my session, I gave some primer information on publishers, age ratings, and of course, some must-buy titles! Check out my resources below, and hopefully you find a title or two to put on your purchase lists.

There are a lot of great titles nominated each year for prestigious comics awards. Here are some of the relevant winners and nominees for categories that will help school librarians with their purchasing decisions. 

I definitely haven't read all of these amazing titles (yet!), but where I can, I have linked my review of the titles I have finished. As always, this list means I have even more titles to add to my towering TBR pile!

I had the pleasure of speaking at K.C. Boyd's Back-to-School professional development mini-con in August of 2022. I got to share about some must-buy titles for Fall of 2022, and hear from some folks from across the nation. This was a fantastic experience, and I'm so honored I was included! Below are the resources I shared with the audience. Hope you find some great titles to add to your lists this semester!

Check out my article: "Tackling Readers Advisory within your Manga Collection" from July's issue of Booklist's Guide to Graphic Novels in Libraries.
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This February, I not only helped co-chair the CSLA 2022 Virtual Conference, I presented yet again! I love being able to share what I'm passionate about and to help others find great books to put on their shelves. Take a look at the resources below.

Title List

In 2020, I challenged myself to read a book a day and made my goal of 366 books (as it was a leap year!). This was made a little more possible by the state-wide shut-down in March of 2020, where California basically stopped operating and everyone stayed in their homes for months on end. In 2021, with going back to in-person teaching and a little bit of normal life, I brought that challenge down to 300. Then, a personal tragedy in November forced me well off my reading goal, so I *only* read 275 books in 2021. I'm still very pleased with how many books I was able to read. Here's to hopefully getting to 300 in 2022!

​Normally I like to limit my best books to 10, but this year, I just couldn’t bring myself to cut it down!

So that multiple volumes don't clog up this list, I have included all volumes of a series as one item. To be fair to everything I've read this year, I haven't included my personal favorite series that were being re-released this year, such as Fullmetal Alchemist, which received a beautiful hardcover edition, The Fullmetal Edition, or Sailor Moon, which is being republished in a really hefty Eternal Edition. 

I attended AASL in October of 2021, and had MANY titles to recommend. In this list, I have combined Elementary (ELEM), Middle School (MS), and High School (HS) recommendations but have notated on the list which would be appropriate for each age group. I also book-talked most of these titles and explained the rationale for each age group rating, so let me know if you have any questions!

One (good) problem of a growing graphic novel section is how to shelve all the wonderful titles so that students and patrons may easily find them. I recently did an overhaul of my shelving system in my graphic novel area, and the results have been positively received by my students. They all say that it has been easier to find what they want to read, and I don't even have signage out yet to explain how things are shelved!

Another reason to redesign your shelving system is to maximize shelving. Shelving graphic novel together by format instead of shelving all graphic novels intermixed means you'll have similar format sizes all together, and can adjust shelving. Manga tends to be much shorter than most books, so you can usually fit another shelf in this section. Comicbooks are a bit taller, so depending on your shelving, you mind need a little more room here.

Here was my old shelving system: All graphic novels were pulled out of regular Dewey order, but still maintained a 741.5 label on the spine. All manga were shelved together alphabetically by mangaka (manga creator); all comicbooks were shelved together alphabetically by author; all graphic novels were shelved together alphabetically by author. Now, I have four different sections: Manga, Comicbooks, Graphic Fiction, and Graphic Nonfiction. Read on to find out what I’ve done and some tips on how to implement this in your library.

Special thanks to Emily R., Megan T., and Chris D. for chatting repeatedly with me about the best scheme to use to reorganize this whole section. 

July means Eisner month! This year, ComicCon@Home happened mostly on YouTube, so you can watch the entire awards ceremony if you're into that sort of thing. The awards were held on July 23rd, 2021.

Titles are nominated by a panel of folks in the comics industry, a librarian, and an academic researcher. Then, comics industry folks, librarians, and comic academics can vote for the winners. While the panel of folks have read all of these titles (and many more!), those voting for winners definitely do not need to have read everything to vote. The entire list of winners AND nominees is full of some amazing titles because they were the BEST of what the small committee read this year. I suggest checking out the full list of winners and nominees posted here by the Comics Beat. Since this website is School Library related, I'll be posting the winners and nominees for categories that will help school librarians with their purchasing decisions.

I definitely haven't read all of these amazing titles (yet!), but where I can, I have linked my review of the titles I have finished. As always, this list means I have even more titles to add to my towering TBR pile!