The Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association (APALA) Scholarships and Awards Committee is excited to announce the recipients of the 2022’s APALA Travel Grant & APALA Scholarship Award: Kristine Techavanich & Hayley Park!
2022 APALA Travel Grant Recipient: Kristine Techavanich
Kristine Techavanich (she/her) works at the North Olympic Library System as a Youth Services Librarian in western Washington state. Her work includes maintaining the juvenile fiction collection and providing programming and outreach. She previously worked as a Children’s Librarian at the Mandel Public Library of West Palm Beach in Florida from January 2017 to January 2022. She earned her MLIS from the University of South Florida in 2014 and holds a BA from the University of Central Florida in Philosophy and Humanities.
Kristine contributed to The Horn Book Magazine from 2020-2021 as a reviewer of children’s literature and was elected to serve on the 2023 Newbery Committee in the spring of 2021.
The 2022 ALA Annual Conference will be Kristine’s first time attending the ALA Annual Conference.
In her spare time, Kristine enjoys photography, cozy video games and exploring nature.
Sponsored by Springer Nature, the APALA Travel Grant provides $500.00 to support attendance at the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference. The grant recipient will write a reflection on their time attending the conference, and their reflections will be published in the APALA website/newsletter.
2022 APALA Scholarship Award Recipient: Hayley Park
Hayley Park (she/they) is a graduate student currently pursuing a degree in Master of Library and Information Science at the University of Washington Information School with an emphasis in digital scholarship, data curation, and community outreach and engagement.
Before starting the MLIS program, Hayley worked as one of the primary onsite library staff at an institutional library inside a juvenile detention center. There Hayley realized both the limitation of traditional library services and the potential for libraries as a transformative intersectional space and librarians as change agents. Building on her ten years of experience as a public library worker at King County Library System, WA, Hayley is committed to making sustainable cultural change within the field of librarianship by creating a more democratic and equitable community outreach strategy that directly involves the most impacted stakeholders at all levels of the service planning process. Hayley currently co-chairs a system-wide DEI assessment project at her work. Using a social justice framework, Hayley led team efforts completing a comparative scan of public libraries in their current organizational DEI efforts and conducting key community leader interviews. In addition to her work in public libraries, Hayley works as a graduate assistant at the University of Washington Libraries where she actively incorporates multilingual materials into quarterly digital scholarship workshop curricula. Academically, Hayley has been recognized as one of the 2022 Husky 100 by the University of Washington this year.
As a first-generation knowledge worker, Hayley is drawn to ideas and practices that challenge cultural hegemony and structural inequities. Hayley is committed to disrupting the current unequal power dynamic our profession as a whole has with the members of marginalized communities both within and outside the field and will work toward building a more inclusive community that directly invites those currently absent from library spaces.
The APALA Scholarship is an annual $1,000 award that provides financial assistance to a student of Asian or Pacific background who is enrolled in, or has been accepted into, a master’s or doctoral degree program in library and/or information science at a school accredited by the American Library Association (ALA).