I’m Lettycia Terrones, an unlikely PhD student in Information Sciences and Latina/o Studies at Illinois. My project studies the confluence of pedagogical, aesthetic, and institutional investments that intersect at the site of Chicanx children’s literature and its use in children’s story hours in U.S. public libraries. I conduct oral histories with Chicana picturebook artists and Chicana librarians, and examine these though interdisciplinary frameworks in Critical Ethnic Studies, Black, Indigenous, Chicanx Feminisms, Chicanx aesthetics, children’s library services historiography, picturebook literary criticism, and performance studies, visual studies, and object/thing theory. All of these provide ways of looking, angles for asking, and ways for living that The Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and its affiliated courses has brought into my life. 

If I’m lucky, I hope to write a book about Chicanx picturebooks, and to teach, research, and write as a professor in a Library and Information Studies university program. I love being a librarian, but my heart’s desire is to be a professor of youth library services to contribute to the training of future librarians and the scholarship of children’s literature. 

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