Up your reading game with the Spring Books & Bites Bingo reading challenge!
A reading challenge is a great way to set reading goals for yourself, discover new authors and genres, and have fun while doing it.
more: Spring into Reading with Books & Bites Bingo
A JCPL librarian interviews published writers about their favorite writing prompts. These exercises can help inspire, focus, and improve your creative writing.
Brought to you in partnership with the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning.
Poet Kevin Nance uses writing prompts regularly because they "can take you places that you never could have gone any other way."
On this episode, Kevin discusses ways to access the part of the brain that author Marilynne Robinson believes is most creative—your "back mind." He also shares a prompt that helps his writing students "tap into their inner angst." Listen below!
more: Prompt to Page with Kevin Nance
JCPL librarians bring you book recommendations and discuss the bites and beverages to pair with them.
This month, we discuss books where the weather plays a major role, one of the prompts on the Winter Books & Bites Bingo reading challenge.
From hurricanes to snowstorms, this episode has all the major weather events covered!
If you're participating in Winter Books & Bites Bingo, don't forget to turn in your bingo card by the end of March. Turn your card in at the Customer Service Desk to receive your bookmark or use the online entry form.
more: The Forecast Calls for Books
In February 2019, the Jessamine County Public Library began recording oral history interviews with several current and former Jessamine County residents about their relatives who are buried in Locust Grove, an African-American cemetery in Nicholasville, Kentucky.
Condensed versions of the interviews were published as part of the Locust Grove Oral History podcast and later re-released as episode two of the Jessamine History Walks podcast.
Now the complete Locust Grove oral history interviews and transcripts are available in the Kentucky Digital Library (KDL). KDL aims "to enhance scholarship, research, and lifelong learning by providing access to shared digital archival collections in the Commonwealth of Kentucky."
These longer interviews help give researchers and community members a better understanding of Black life in Jessamine County.
more: Locust Grove Oral History Interviews Available in the Kentucky Digital Library
A JCPL librarian interviews published writers about their favorite writing prompts. These exercises can help inspire, focus, and improve your creative writing.
Brought to you in partnership with the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning.
Poet Shauna M. Morgan understands that feeling "weighed down by all of those things happening around us" can make writing even more challenging.
For her, it helps to remember "that generations of my forebears created art in times of abject crises and bore witness to what was happening."
On episode 53, Shauna shares what she calls the "weight prompt." It will help you reflect on subjects that feel heavy to you as well as subjects that feel light. Listen below!
more: Prompt to Page with Shauna M. Morgan
Join us for a screening of Lexington: Resilience in the Redline at our Black History Month Celebration!
On episode 110 of the Books & Bites podcast, we discuss books set on trains or ships.
Need an excuse to get baking? January is National Baking Month and February is National Bake for Family Fun Month!
Celebrate both months with online library resources that can help you discover recipes and learn new techniques.
more: Bake Up Something Delicious This Winter
A JCPL librarian interviews published writers about their favorite writing prompts. These exercises can help inspire, focus, and improve your creative writing.
Brought to you in partnership with the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning.
While novelist Mary Anna Evans believes that studying writing is "very valuable," she also advises writers "to go out and live your life." She says that "all experience is useful" in writing.
And she should know. Mary Anna's books have drawn on her former engineering career and her interest in archaeology, among other experiences.
Mary Anna's favorite writing prompt will help writers of all backgrounds and genres explore setting. She's successfully used it with fiction and nonfiction students and even environmental architecture students. Listen below!
more: Prompt to Page with Mary Anna Evans
JCPL librarians bring you book recommendations and discuss the bites and beverages to pair with them.
We're kicking off the Winter Books & Bites Bingo reading challenge with audiobooks read by multiple narrators! These multi-voiced productions make audiobooks even more engaging.
Tune into our action-packed choices: a YA dystopian novel, a horror/thriller hybrid, and a sweeping, historical Western.
more: Listen Up: Audiobooks with Multiple Narrators