The Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association (APALA) Scholarships and Awards Committee is excited to announce the recipients of the 2023 APALA Scholarship and Sage & JCLC Inc. NALCo Student Scholarship Award! Please extend a heartfelt congratulations to Gelli Marie Nocon and Jennifer Nguyen Bernal!
If you are interested in future Scholarship and Travel award opportunities for APALA members, please make sure you visit our APALA website: https://www.apalaweb.org/awards/
Learn more about our 2023 recipients below!
2023 APALA Scholarship Recipient: Gelli Marie Nocon
The APALA Scholarship is an annual $2,000 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).
Based in Southern California, Gelli Marie Nocon is a daughter of Filipino immigrants. She graduated from California State University Dominguez Hills with a B.A. in History. She will begin the Master of Library and Information Science program at San Jose State University this fall. She currently works as the Library Assistant at Signal Hill Public Library. Her work is centered in providing collections, programs, and services that reflect and meet the needs of historically excluded communities.
2023 APALA Sage & JCLC NALCo LIS Student Scholarship Recipient: Jennifer Nguyen Bernal
Sage Publishing and the Joint Council of Librarians of Color (JCLC Inc.) are pleased to announce a new scholarship program that will award $2,000 each to five library school students – one from each of the five National Associations of Librarians of Color (NALCo), including APALA.
Jennifer Nguyen Bernal is a first-year MLIS student at the University of California, Los Angeles. She graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a bachelor’s in Asian American Studies and Chicanx Studies. Her current passion is researching the intersection of Ethnic Studies and Library and Information Studies through participatory engagement with marginalized communities and focusing on open access to information sources through a social justice framework to highlight marginalized voices. As an undergrad, she worked on her research on voicing the lived experience of solidarity between the Southeast Asian and Latinx undocumented communities. She worked on various projects to support the Filipinx community, like the Welga Digital Archive, creating educational materials for communities of color, and published podcast episodes that made the community’s needs evident by collecting testimonies at the Bulosan Center for Filipinx Studies. In the summer of 2022, Jennifer co-curated the “California is in the Heart” exhibit at the California Museum in Sacramento.