I moved to the Bay Area from Florida in December 2011 to accept the position of  Assistant Manager and Collection Development Manager for the Fisher Children’s Center in the San Francisco Public Library’s Main Library. From 2001 – 2003, I worked as Children’s Department Manager of the Orange County Library System in Orlando, Florida, the same library I grew up visiting as a child. During my career with the Orange County Library, I served successively as a substitute clerk, paraprofessional, librarian, and eventually assistant manager of the system’s largest and mainly Spanish-speaking branch. In my position in the Children’s Department, I oversaw the summer reading program and a troupe of storytellers and librarians who supplied programming to the entire 14-branch system.

Between my two library careers, I worked as a professional journalist, writer, and editor. From 2004 – 2011, I was associate editor of the Heritage Florida Jewish News in Orlando and won national and state journalism awards. I traveled extensively and made several trips to the Middle East. I love continuing to use my journalism skills to create content for SFPL’s Facebook page and Children’s-oriented web pages. I also want to bring my passion for writing and storytelling to document my Eureka project’s effect on my community of library users.

At SFPL, I do children’s and family programming, oversee the Effie Lee Morris Historical and Research Collection of Children’s Literature, work with a children’s international collection that contains books in more than 60 languages, and assist my manager in supervising a 13-person staff. I currently serve on SFPL’s Children’s Book Evaluation Committee and am researching and writing a proposal to fund a technology-based center for tweens.

I have a 14-year-old son and a 21-year-old daughter. I speak French, Spanish, and Hebrew and I’m studying Russian and Mandarin. I love movies, theater, poetry, fantasy and science fiction, graphic novels, and books about comparative culture, politics, the environment, and San Francisco history.