I wasn’t a public library kid when I was little. But my mother was an elementary school teacher and I was great pals with my school librarian, which meant I had unlimited access both to the books in my mother’s classroom and to library after hours. For a small trade of helping Ms. Courtney check in books and re-shelving, I could check out as many books as I wanted at a time.
I was never greedy. I only liked to read one book at a time, so I only ever took out as many as I could read before the next time I went to the library. (Which was every day…)
Ms. Courtney’s library was a safe space for me. Nine times out of ten, if my mom couldn’t find me, I was probably in the back corner of the library next to the windows. The shelves under the window sill held historical fiction. The row to the left was where I got my fantasy fix. I was usually reading the latest installment of the Redwall series, re-shelving it before I left so it would be there for my friends to check out.
I was delighted to reconnect with Ms. Courtney as an adult when my debut young adult novel, Love Requires Chocolate, came out. Signing a book for her felt so full circle. She’d helped make me a reader and then sent me out into the world; I’d always kept her fifth grade graduation present for me—a plush little book with a worm puppet in its center—close by.
My family and I had watched the livestream coverage of the Obama Presidential Center opening together. I scrolled mindlessly on Threads as we watched to see if others were also tuned in. That was when I saw authors Steven Underwood and Morgan Hampton post that they’d found out their books were in the new Obama Presidential Center, a new branch of the Chicago Public Library.1
My first reaction was delight: we love to see books on Black digital culture and Black superheroes in the first Black president’s library!
My second was a little curiosity: I wondered if my own books were there.
I shut it down immediately.
My feelings had been hurt too many times hoping for things behind my books.
And at any rate, who would even think to dream of such a thing?
Over the weekend, I continued to see a trickle of folks posting that they’d found their books in the Obama library catalogue. By Monday, I’d folded. I figured I’d bring my professional research credentials out of retirement just this once to see if I could figure out how to search the catalogue for my books.
Turns out, because it’s a branch of the Chicago Public Library, it’s nothing but a quick search for your name in their publicly available database, and to view available locations for your books.
Love Requires Chocolate was available in 9 branches of the Chicago Public Library. Love in 280 Characters or Less was available in 6.
They were both available in the Obama Presidential Center.
After a full business week of celebrating that impossible news and helping other friends find out if their books were also in the library, I woke early on Saturday to head downtown. My hometown’s new library’s ribbon cutting ceremony was to begin at 9 AM.
This new library was over twenty years in the making. It would replace the old Morgan Memorial library, which when they opened thirty years ago, was supposed to be temporary.
Personally, I was ecstatic. Our city’s library system has three locations, though the one out in Chuckatuck, very close to my elementary school, is only open on Mondays and by appointment. That leaves your options to the Morgan Memorial Library downtown or the North Suffolk Library. The North Suffolk Library opened as I was finishing high school. I spent time there the summer before I left for college, finding comics and supplementing my IB reading list with things folks read in AP Lit. Both were about equidistant from me but I liked North Suffolk better than Morgan Memorial, mostly because it was new and well lit.
But I quickly discovered that much of the books I’d wanted to read, which were Black American classics, were housed in the downtown library, where there was a larger population of Black residents.
It had seemed unfair to me then that my beloved Black books were relegated to a small, old, musty library. I wanted them to be in a library as nice as the one in North Suffolk. I wanted everybody to have access to nice things.
This is exactly what the Library Director, Clint S. Rudy, said in his remarks at the ribbon cutting, almost a decade after I made this discovery. He, too, believes, that everyone in Suffolk should have access to nice things. And so he made it his mission, in partnership with community members and his teams, to give us something beautiful.
Boy, did they deliver.
The new library is gorgeous. Two stories with elevators and other important accessibility features for entrance, including a ramp up to the building and automatic doors. There are four main book collection spaces: a local author section right when you walk in, a kids’ section to the left with rows and rows of books placed face out so you can see the covers, a dedicated teen section with video and board games, which the teens had already started to post up in almost as soon as the library opened, and the adult collection on the second floor. There’s seating everywhere. Individual chairs, benches, booths around tables like work stations. Plus dozens of public use computers and so many rooms! There were small single use work rooms up to larger ones meeting spaces and one conference room that could hold up to one hundred people. There were even spaces outdoors, a terrace, benches for people to sit and have lunch on, a big chess board and maybe even a mini golf area.
I could just imagine myself going down there to do some writing, stopping at the local coffee shop I like so much, Cafe Davina, on my way home.
We do, indeed deserve nice things, no matter how long it takes.
I know there’s copies of my books in the Suffolk Public Library system, mostly because I’ve seen them at both locations before. I naturally went in search of Love Requires Chocolate in the new library.
I didn’t find it, but upon speaking with a librarian, it turns out they’re still processing all their books over, so it might take a little while to turn up on the shelves, but she promised to call me when it was there. I think they want a picture as much as I do. :)
In one week, I was searching for my books in a brand new library in hometown that was a long time coming and in one of the most important new libraries in the nation connected to the first Black president. Both were equally important to me. Both brought me such joy.
I’ve come a long way from the kid who used to shelve books in the Oakland Elementary library after school and snag books from my mother’s classroom book shelves. But I’m realizing that Mr. Rudy’s words hit home because that’s at the core of why I write books for young people: I think everyone, but especially kids, deserve nice things, and I’ll do my part to help make that happen.
I’m going to keep telling stories. And one day, maybe I’ll meet a kid who read my book for the first time when they checked it out at the new downtown library or from the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.
I hope they know it was all for them.
My current library read: Sisters in the Wind by Angeline Boulley
Okay so here’s the thing. Generally, I’m not a thriller or a horror person, which is nuts because I actually do read a decent amount of horror, especially horror comics. I just don’t like being voluntarily stressed out—or rather, I am very intentional about the conditions under which I consume narratives that might distress me. Because I do read/watch such things often, I just do it with care.
Which is quite a stance for me to be on my third Angeline Boulley book in about a year.
They’re just so good!
Frankly, I love this Firekeeper’s Daughter universe and I could live here for an eternity. This community feels like coming home to family when I open a new book, even as I am distressed.
I’m almost halfway through with this one, but I think Warrior Girl Unearthed might still be my favorite, we’ll see if I still feel that way once I’m done. I just love Perry.
If you’re new here and you don’t want to do all that clicking to find out what I’m about: I’m Dr. Ravynn K. Stringfield, a writer, editor, artist and former Peanut Fest Queen from Suffolk, Virginia. I am the author of two novels for young adults, Love in 280 Characters or Less (Feiwel & Friends, 2025) and Love Requires Chocolate (Joy Revolution, 2024). I am a product of Virginia public schools (Suffolk Public Schools) and universities (University of Virginia), all the way up to my PhD in American Studies from William & Mary. I’ve been published in a variety of venues for the last seven years—book collections, magazines, scholarly journals—but most importantly, I’m a life long reader and a maker of beautiful things.2
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Edit as of 6/29/2026, 6:30 PM: An earlier version this post talked about the 3,000 volume personally selected collection. The books are in the greater Obama Library, but are likely not in the Reading Room. I have removed that line for accuracy.
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