Who are the brilliant and passionate librarians behind SLJ’s reviews? Each month we take a peek behind the books and learn about the folks who help us read and evaluate thousands of titles every year.

How long have you reviewed for SLJ and what kinds of books do you review? Since 2008. I review mostly nonfiction. For a while there I felt like SLJ sent me every book on ancient cultures ever published! I also get art books, and I love reviewing graphic novels. I have written the 700s section of Series Made Simple a bunch of times. My kids help me field-test the instructions, and we are very critical reviewers! When I review a book for SLJ, I feel like I am reading it through hundreds of eyes at once. I like the idea of pointing other librarians to a really fine book, or conversely, shooing them away from a book that is not worth our precious time and limited resources. What do you do at your library? Baltimore County Public Library professional staff are generalists. We serve adults, teens, children, and babies! While my personal focus is children’s and teen literature, I also have to keep abreast of adult best sellers, trends, and genre fiction. It may seem like a lot, but it makes me think about readers in a more holistic way. I see the adult men who only read nonfiction, and I know the kinds of boys they were. I see kids who devour mysteries, and I know which adult series to point them to once they run out of juvenile books. Tell us something surprising about yourself. I am kind of full of surprises—four tattoos, two dead languages, and I know how to make a hologram—but what people really find surprising is that I have never read any of the books in Lois Lowry’s “Giver” quartet (Houghton Harcourt). Is there a book that made you fall in love with reading? E.L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler meant the world to me as a young person. Mrs. Frankweiler and Claudia are prickly female characters in love with art and history and knowledge. They showed me that my own idiosyncrasies and interests were not so weird and that maybe I could move through life without compromise or apology.