The 2023-24 Dorothy Helfeld Fellowship application period is OPEN!
- Fellowship application
- Applications are due Friday, July 14, 2023
We invite you to apply for the Dorothy Helfeld Fellowship! The fellowship offers rich opportunities for professional development, networking, and mentorship. Tap into an active network of Bay Area children’s librarians who meet monthly to share their passion for children’s literature and library services. The annual fellowship covers the cost of a year’s membership in ACL, access to monthly professional development opportunities, mentorship, ACL’s digital review publication Bayviews, and free attendance to any ACL hosted events.
Who is eligible?
We encourage Northern California students, colleagues new to the field, or people with interest in children’s literature and librarianship to apply.
Fellows are expected to make a reasonable effort to attend the monthly ACL meetings (currently over Zoom) and to become regular reviewers for the organization for the duration of their Fellowship. Additional in-person events may occur in the San Francisco Bay Area
Who is Dorothy Helfeld?
The Association of Children’s Librarians of Northern California (ACL) offers four annual membership fellowships in tribute to Dorothy Helfeld, a member and reviewer for this organization from 1992 until her death in 2008. Dorothy’s library experience spanned several decades and locales. Her ACL reviews reflected her passion for presenting the best to children and her always-growing knowledge of story and authors, which she also shared in her contributions to the annual Institute bibliographies. To Dorothy, reading offered the boundless opportunity for celebrating, untangling and enduring the complicated knot of life. The fellowships in her memory allow the Association of Children’s Librarians of Northern California to extend Dorothy’s excitement about children and their books to those at the beginning of their involvement in the field which meant so much to her.
Applications
Applications are due by Friday July 21, 2032. Fellows will be announced in mid-August. The fellowship period begins September 2023 and goes through December 2023. For further information, please get in touch with the fellowship committee here.
Past Fellows
2022 Fellows: Jennifer Agarwal, Shani Boyd, Greta Marti, Karen Quest, and Megan Wolf
2019 Fellows: Amy Bouris, Solia Martinez-Jacobs, Traci Willard, and Louise Yu
2018 Fellows: Catherine Pyun and Tara Hjalmquist
2017 Fellows: Arin Hailey Reese, Alyson Runke, Emily Ferne, Jennifer Weisberg
2016 Fellows: Mahasin Aleem, Julia Christy, Lolade Gbadebo and Renee Ting
2015 Fellows: Kayla Figard, Michelle Ng, and Sarah Zaharako
Note: The Dorothy Helfeld Fellowship was previously known as the Dorothy Helfeld Scholarship, and was renamed to Dorothy Helfeld Fellowship in 2014.