Celebrating Black Women & Black Joy display text and photo by Catherine Jensen
Our most recent display at the UW Tacoma Library, Celebrating Black Women & Black Joy, has arrived! With Black History Month right around the corner, and Women’s History Month immediately after that, what better way to celebrate than to stop by and browse our many adult, young adult and children’s books that comprise the display?!
In addition to books, we have signs highlighting the importance of humor as well as the work of the Combahee River Collective and the Cite Black Women Collective—with QR codes to related resources and their websites, respectively. Meanwhile, shelf talkers indicate our fiction and non-fiction sections and draw attention to two e-book offerings: Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology by Barbara Smith and Black Trans Feminism by Marquis Bey.
Not only can students, staff and community members can check out all of our materials, but they are encouraged to do so!
Ultimately, we hope the display helps increase awareness of the incredible contributions and achievements of Black Women—including artists, scientists, scholars, activists and more—and the movement towards joy as an act of resistance.
Any questions or comments? Be sure to leave a note below!
Astrology and Romance displays text and photos by Lauryn Cole
Star-Crossed & Lovers
While some of the lovers in the new Romance Display may be star-crossed, you can also head to the Astrology display to find recommendations based on your own star chart. This term the UW Tacoma Library is welcoming two new displays to inspire your leisure-browsing activities and to remind you that reading can be as whimsical as you dream (or, in this case, display).
The Astrology selection, located on the second floor of the Tioga Library Building near the PNW section, provides reading recommendations based on the common characteristics of each sign. For example, our Aries reads (competitive, energetic, impulsive, and fearless reads) include books like Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi and The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang. Whereas our Cancer recommendations (compassionate, giving, sentimental, and nurturing reads) feature titles like Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine.
Whether you want to explore books in your own chart or explore a new sign altogether, these books provide a fun catalyst to thinking about how we define ourselves, alternate ways of understanding our place in the cosmos, and contemplating the fact that we are, actually, part star-dust.
The second display at the UW Tacoma Library is all about love and also located on the second floor of the Tioga Library Building (this time by the Consultation Studio). While originally intended to celebrate the genre of Romance (and many of the titles do), the books in this collection span Love Stories, Literary Fiction with a love through-line, and Romantasy.
Romance has a trashy reputation in the literary world. However, this display invites you to reconsider that stereotype and invest in literature that celebrates love, optimism, and pleasure. Romance gives us the opportunity to engage in a thought experiment that tends towards the realm of speculative fiction. What are the stakes of imagining a world that prioritizes happy endings, celebrates desire, and guarantees a happy ending? In a world that often disregards ‘sappier’ emotions for the sake of productivity and efficiency, reading Romance is a form of resistance (and what a pleasurable one it is).
Explore this display to find classic titles like Emma by Jane Austen and The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton or contemporary finds like Hani & Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating by Adiba Jaigirdar. For further reading, check out this supplement to our Romance display: Feel The Love.jpg
