Opening Keynote
JENNIFER FERRETTI
Jennifer A. Ferretti (she/her) is an artist and information professional living and working on the unceded land of the Susquehannock, Nentego (Nanticoke), and Piscataway Peoples (Baltimore, Maryland). Jennifer is the Director of the Digital Library Federation at the Council on Library and Information Resources and has been part of the library, archives, and museum communities for over 15 years. She is a first-generation American born Latina/Mestiza whose work is guided by critical praxis, not neutrality. Jennifer believes art is information and is interested in the research methodologies of artists and non-Western forms of knowledge making and sharing. In 2016 she founded We Here®️, a supportive community for library and archives workers who identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Find her on Twitter and Instagram.
DR. JON E. CAWTHORNE
Dr. Jon E. Cawthorne is the dean of Wayne State University Library System in Detroit, Michigan, where he provides administrative leadership and vision for five libraries, including the medical and law libraries, and the Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, which houses the world’s largest labor archives. Cawthorne also leads the ALA-accredited Wayne State School of Information Sciences, the only master’s-only program nationally ranked in the top 25 Library and Information Studies Programs by U.S. News & World Report. He began his leadership career in Detroit in 2002 as director of the Detroit Public Library’s flagship branch, where he was later named interim deputy director to lead the entire 24-branch system through an organizational transition. He went on to hold leadership roles at Florida State University, Boston College, San Diego State University and West Virginia State before joining Wayne State in 2017.
At West Virginia University (WVU) Libraries Cawthorne extended digital knowledge resources to seven regional campus libraries to create a virtually integrated library system. Along with a team of talented librarians and professional staff, he established the WVU Digital Publishing Institute to advance open-access scholarship through new digital pathways for academic publication and dissemination of knowledge. In 2015, Cawthorne’s commitment to diversity among academic librarians led to the foundation of the Library Diversity Alliance, a four-institution residency program comprising WVU, American University, the University of Iowa and Virginia Tech. In 2016, an inspired Association of College & Research Libraries Board voted to sponsor and support the Alliance under the ACRL aegis. Today, Cawthorne chairs the ACRL Diversity Alliance program, which unites 36 academic libraries that share a commitment to growing the hiring pipeline of qualified, talented individuals from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. In 2020, Cawthorne served as ACRL president, an elected position where he focused on issues around organizational development; equity, diversity and inclusion; and the future of academic libraries.
Cawthorne’s published research bridges the realms of diversity, libraries, organizational culture and leadership with a shared focus on models that anticipate and plan for rapid change and the future through strategic capacity building and workforce development.
Closing Keynote
Featured Panelists
Mallary Rawls
Mallary Rawls (she/her) is a Humanities Librarian at Florida State University. She works with the English and Classics departments, African American Studies, and Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies programs. Her research interests include critical information studies, critical librarianship, African American literature, and American history. Mallary was a diversity resident at Florida State University libraries from 2018 through 2020.
Kenvi C. Phillips, PhD
Kenvi C. Phillips, PhD is currently the inaugural Director for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the Brown University Library. In her time at Brown University, she has been working to increase diversity, strengthen relationships across campus, Providence, and the wider academic community. As an adviser to the University Librarian, she has been an integral part of strategic planning and relationship building for the library across the campus, in the region, and with other academic and institutions. She has led the efforts to improve onboarding of new staff, developed series to introduce newly restructured and existing departments to campus community, and serve as an adviser to special collections and digital publishing initiatives. She works across library departments to ensure that the library facilities and practices are inclusive of the diversity of and equitable across our staff and patrons.
Maria Rios
Maria Rios (she/they), in her role as Humanities Librarian, weaves anti-oppressive praxis throughout her engagement with the teaching and learning community at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. As a privacy advocate through Library Freedom Project, their privacy specialties and interests center community empowerment, mental health support, anti-surveillance, and trauma informed/aware care. She earned her MLIS from the University of South Carolina and is recognized as an Association of Research Libraries Kaleidoscope Scholar 2016–2018 cohort. They have co-authored several book chapters, among them, “Vision, Voices, and Self-care in academic library residencies” (Residencies Revisited Reflections on Library Residency Programs from the Past and Present, 2022) and “Dewhitening Librarianship: A Policy Proposal for Libraries (Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory, 2021).
Yoonha Hwang
Yoonha Hwang is the Special Collections Cataloging Librarian at Columbia University Libraries, where they provide original cataloging and support the creation, organization, and maintenance of the university’s rare and special collections materials. Prior to this position, they were the Librarian for Undergraduate Support at the Harvard College Library, under the Harvard Library Diversity Residency Program and the ACRL Diversity Alliance. She also worked as the Nadia Sophie Seiler Rare Materials Resident at the Yale Center for British Art and gained substantive exposure to working with and cataloging rare materials. They received an MLIS from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), with a specialization in Rare Books/Print and Visual Culture, and a BA in English literature and language with a concentration in book studies from Smith College.
Jason Alston
Jason Alston holds a PhD in library and information science from the University of South Carolina, as well as an MLS from North Carolina Central University and a Bachelors in English from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Alston has taught for the LIS program at Mizzou since 2018. He also has experience as UNC-Greensboro’s first diversity resident librarian, a business librarian for Coastal Carolina University, and as a reference librarian for Forsyth County (NC) Public Library, Midlands Technical College and the University of Missouri – Kansas City. Alston’s dissertation focused on diversity residency programs. Alston is originally from Soul City, North Carolina and can be found on Twitter and Instagram under the username ‘SoulCitySigma’.
Magee Lawhorn
Magee Lawhorn is the Head of Archives & Special Collections at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. Besides managing institutional records she is the co-chair on various school-wide committees, an academic advisor, and part-time prospective student interviewer. Prior to this role she was at Houghton Library as a project archivist and visiting administrative fellow working to discover born-digital materials within the collections holdings while assisting the accessioning team. Before Harvard she worked at Artspace Inc. (New Haven), the Farmington Libraries, Yale-China Association, Museum of Chinese in America, WFMT Radio Network & the Chicago History Museum, and the Asian American Studies Program (library), in various capacities as Research Manager, Archivist, Librarian, Operations Associate, and Intern. She graduated from Cornell University with a B.A in Archaeology and a Minor in Music and received her Master’s in Library & Information Science with an Archival Studies concentration from St. John’s University, and recently earned a graduate certificate in Non-profit Management from the Harvard Extension School.
Mitch Nakaue
Mitch Nakaue (she/her) joined Houghton Library as a scholarly communication librarian through the ACRL Diversity Alliance and Harvard Library residency programs, and is now Houghton's Librarian for Scholarly Communication and editor of Harvard Library's open access journal, Harvard Library Bulletin. Previously, she held administrative and faculty positions at the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, The University of Iowa, the University of Notre Dame, and roles in the private sector. Mitch holds degrees in English from Lewis and Clark College and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a library science degree with archives focus from Simmons University. Academic interests include literary history—especially British modernism—and scholarly editing.
