Each fall we gather to celebrate and recognize former head librarian Barbara Ballinger and her many years of dedicated service to the library and to Oak Park. This annual event is sponsored by the Friends of the Oak Park Public Library.
About Barbara Ballinger
Born in 1925 in Miami, Oklahoma, Barbara Ballinger began her library career with the Oklahoma City Public Library. After graduating from the University of Kansas, she received her chauffeur’s license to drive a bookmobile for the Topeka Public Library. She went on to earn her MSLS degree at the Graduate School of Library Science of the University of Illinois. As an Oak Park librarian, Ballinger expected to stay in her position for only a few years. Instead, she retired in 1991 after 32 years of library service in Oak Park, including her 24 years as head librarian at the Oak Park Public Library.
She led the library during a period of extensive growth and change, a time that saw development of Illinois library resource sharing, the introduction of multiple new technologies, and the overall growth of the library’s collection and use. Read more about her in these two Oak Park Oak Leaves newspaper articles (pdfs) from the 1970s. She valued working with civic-minded library boards, dedicated staff members, and the ever-supportive Friends of the Oak Park Public Library.
Ballinger was instrumental in creating the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Archives and helping the library obtain Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1910 Wasmuth portfolio, both now housed in the Main Library’s Special Collections. After her retirement, Ballinger remained involved through her library volunteer work and attendance in the annual author lecture held in her honor. Always a lover of poetry, she died at the age of 97 on November 14, 2022 at The British Home in Riverside, IL.
2022 Presenters: Natalie Moore & Doris Davenport
This year’s featured guest was author and WBEZ journalist Natalie Moore, in conversation with local radio host Doris Davenport. The event was held at the Main Library and virtually on Zoom.
More about Natalie
Natalie Moore covers segregation and inequality. Her enterprise reporting has tackled race, housing, economic development, food injustice, and violence. Natalie’s work has been broadcast on the BBC, Marketplace, and NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition. Natalie is the author of The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation, winner of the 2016 Chicago Review of Books award for nonfiction, and a Buzzfeed best nonfiction book of 2016. She is also co-author of The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall, and Resurgence of an American Gang and Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation.
More about Doris
Doris Davenport is the radio personality behind the Oak Park-based The Doris Davenport Show: “All Local All The Time,” the Village’s first community radio program dedicated to giving a voice to Village residents while highlighting what makes Oak Park and all of its complexities a wonderful place to live, work, and play.
Doris has featured hundreds of Oak Park residents, movers, and shakers over the years. She has facilitated live local election debates on-air, conducted regular legislative updates with the local elected officials, and moderated several high-stakes community conversations. Doris has earned the nickname “Change Agent,” for the thoughtful courage, energy, and tenacity she brings to projects. She has a strong track record of success working in political, business, nonprofit, and multicultural community environments.
Doris is known for her leadership skills, keen analysis, insights, superior interpersonal skills, and a team approach that facilitates partnerships and drives the implementation of strategies and processes that position projects and clients to win.
Works by Natalie Moore, plus read-alike titles
More about the readalike titles »
2021 Presenter: Michelle Kuo
Michelle Kuo is a writer, attorney, and professor. She is the author of Reading With Patrick, a memoir of mentoring and tutoring a former student in a rural Arkansas county jail.
A graduate of Harvard Law School, Michelle has worked to protect the rights of undocumented immigrants, assist asylum seekers, and defend incarcerated people. She has taught in prisons in the United States, France, and Taiwan.
Michelle is interested in literacy, racial and socioeconomic equality, and abolitionist approaches toward prison and detention. She has published in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Public Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, and other outlets. Recently, she and her husband Albert Wu started "A Broad and Ample Road," a weekly newsletter on culture and politics.
Currently, she is an Associate Professor at the American University of Paris, where she works closely with college students on issues of social justice. She also is a pro bono lawyer for the Stanford Three Strikes Project and helped found Dialogue and Transformation, a global coalition advancing dialogues on peace, justice, and prisons.
2020 presenter: Claire Lombardo
Oak Park native Claire Lombardo is a novelist and teacher. Her first book, The Most Fun We Ever Had, was an instant New York Times bestseller and has been translated or is forthcoming in over a dozen languages. The novel is being adapted for a series on HBO to be written by Claire and co-produced by Amy Adams and Laura Dern.
Claire is a graduate of the University of Illinois-Chicago and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her short fiction has appeared in, among others, Playboy, Barrelhouse Magazine, Little Fiction, and Longform. Her story "I Only Want to Talk About the Nice Things" was one of 2016's Best of the Net, and was #1 on Longform's 2015 fiction list.
Prior to writing The Most Fun We Ever Had, Claire spent several years working with homeless children and families in Chicago. A native of Oak Park, Illinois, she now lives in Iowa City, Iowa, with her dog, Renee.
2019 presenter: Alex Kotlowitz
For 40 years, Alex Kotlowitz has been telling stories from the heart of America, deeply intimate tales of struggle and perseverance.
Alex is the author of four books, including his most recent, An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago (available in print and on CD through the library catalog).
His other books include the national bestseller There Are No Children Here (available in multiple formats through the library catalog), which the New York Public Library selected as one of the 150 most important books of the twentieth century. It received the Helen B. Bernstein Award and was adapted as a television movie produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey. It was selected by The New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year along with his second book, The Other Side of the River, which also received The Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Nonfiction.
His book on Chicago, Never a City So Real (available in multiple formats through the library catalog), is available in paperback. Learn more about the author »
2018 presenter: José Olivarez
José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants, co-author of the book of poems Home Court, and co-host of the poetry podcast, The Poetry Gods.
He is a graduate of Harvard University and the Marketing Manager at Young Chicago Authors. He has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Poets House, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and the Conversation Literary Festival, and his work has been published in The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, The Adroit Journal, The Rumpus, and Hyperallergic, among other places.
His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, from Haymarket Books is out now.
2017 presenter: Jane Hirshfield
Award-winning poet, translator, and essayist Jane Hirshfield's poetry speaks to the central issues of human existence—desire and loss, impermanence and beauty, the many dimensions of our connection with others, and the wider community of creatures and objects with which we share our lives. Demonstrating with quiet authority what it means to awaken into the full capacities of attention, her work sets forth a hard-won affirmation of our human fate.
Described by The New York Times as “radiant and passionate” and by other reviewers as “ethically aware,” “insightful and eloquent,” and as conveying “succinct wisdom,” her subjects range from the metaphysical and passionate to the political, ecological, and scientific to subtle unfoldings of daily life and experience.
Her book of essays on the “mind of poetry” and her several collections presenting and co-translating the work of poets from the past have become classics in their fields. An intimate, profound, and generous master of her art, Hirshfield has taught at UC Berkeley, Duke University, Bennington College, and elsewhere, and her many appearances at writers’ conferences and literary festivals in this country and abroad have been highly acclaimed. Learn more about Jane »
2016 presenter: Wendy McClure
Born and raised in Oak Park, Wendy McClure is a woman of many talents. As the author of The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie, she won the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award for nonfiction in 2011, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, and was a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick.
Her 2005 memoir, I’m Not the New Me, was featured in publications such as Time Magazine, USA Today, Elle, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her infamous online collection of vintage Weight Watcher recipe cards and commentary was published in the 2006 humor book The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan.
Since 2004 she has written the pop culture column for BUST Magazine. Her work has also appeared in publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Glamour, the Chicago Sun-Times, and on the radio program This American Life. She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her work in children’s books includes her historical fiction series, Wanderville, and she has edited more than 50 novels and picture books for children as a senior editor at Albert Whitman & Company. McClure now lives in Chicago with her husband, Chris. Learn more about Wendy McClure »
2015 presenter: Charles Dubow
Author of Indiscretion, Charles DuBow is also a founding editor of Forbes.com, and a former editor at Businessweek.com.
With Girl in the Moonlight, Dubow created a searing tale of love, passion, and obsession—the story of one man's all-consuming desire for a beautiful, bewitching, and elusive woman. Spanning several decades, moving through the worlds of high society and art, and peopled with poignant characters, Girl in the Moonlight takes us from the wooded cottages of the Hamptons to the dining rooms of Upper East Side Manhattan to the glamorous nightlife of Paris and Barcelona. As Dubow vividly brings to life a couple's tempestuous, heart-wrenching affair, he probes the devastating depths of misguided passion and the nature of true love.
2014 presenter: Marilyn Johnson
Best-selling author Marilyn Johnson has a penchant for the unsung people who preserve our cultural memory.
Her two previous works are This Book is Overdue!, which upended the notion that librarians are obsolete in our digital age, and The Dead Beat, which is about a golden age of obituary writers in a time when newspapers are dying.
In Lives in Ruins, Johnson turns her trademark narrative perception and wit to the unglamorous, workaday archeologists who sift through the detritus of the past to explore our own connections with those who came before us—working not only in romantic landscapes like Greece or Machu Picchu, but more often in urban construction sites, forgotten graveyards, and even underwater.
2013 presenter: John Searles
John Searles is the best-selling author of Help for the Haunted, Boy Still Missing, and Strange but True.
Born and raised in New England, the son of a truck-driver father and stay-at-home mom, John’s parents used their connections after his high school graduation to get him a job at the nearby Dupont factory, where he gathered parts for various job orders. It didn’t take him long to realize the place wasn’t for him. John set his sights on becoming the first person in his family to attend college. His personal story of becoming a best-selling author makes one truly believe that anything is possible if you put your mind to it—and work very, very hard.
Today, John frequently appears as a book critic on NBC’s Today show and CBS’s The Early Show. He is the Editor-at-Large of Cosmopolitan. His essays appear in national publications including The New York Times. John lives in New York City.
2012 presenter: Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich is the author of 14 novels as well as volumes of poetry, short stories, children's books, and a memoir of early motherhood.
Her novel Love Medicine won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse was a finalist for the National Book Award. The Plague of Doves won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Much of her writing draws from the Ojibwe tribe of which she is a part, leading to authentic and beautiful levels of detail. Younger readers will find Erdrich’s Birchbark series appealing. The Round House is an exquisitely told story of a boy on the cusp of manhood who seeks justice and understanding in the wake of a terrible crime that upends and forever transforms his family. Riveting, suspenseful, and arguably her most accessible novel to date, it won the 2012 National Book Award for fiction.
Erdrich lives in Minnesota and is the owner of Birchbark Books, an independent bookstore.
