Columbia, SC
Book bans are escalating in South Carolina. According to the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, the state had one of highest rates of book censorship in 2024, behind only Florida, Tennessee, and Texas. University of South Carolina teaching assistant professor Valerie Byrd Fort is helping her community push back.
Byrd Fort is one of the creators of the Get Ready, Stay Ready Community Action Toolkit, a nationally recognized resource that provides librarians and educators with robust tools to fight censorship and invites parents and community caregivers to get involved. Building on this toolkit, she helped develop READCON, a curriculum for library readiness, advocacy, and community empowerment that equips library workers with tools and strategies to foster constructive dialogue, de-escalate tense situations, connect with stakeholders and decision makers, and develop positive messaging.
Prior to her role at USC, Byrd Fort served as a school librarian in the state for more than 15 years. Leveraging that experience, she now provides library services at the South Carolina Center for Community Literacy, a children’s library operated by USC’s School of Information Science that examines new books for children and young adults and provides outreach activities to address community literacy issues. For years, Byrd Fort coordinated Cocky’s Reading Express, the USC’s signature outreach program that brings the university’s mascot Cocky to Title I elementary schools across the state to perform storytimes and provide free book giveaways.
“If the library could be personified, it would come to life as Valerie Byrd Fort,” her nominator wrote. “She is the face of librarianship. Her pure love of what libraries and literacy represent, her genuine passion, her smile, her enthusiasm, her desire to reach all students and citizens through the library, is how we all know her, and she does it all in the service of librarianship.”
Byrd Fort was selected from more than 1,300 nominations from library users nationwide for the 2026 award. As part of her award, she will receive a $5,000 cash prize as well as complimentary registration and a travel stipend to attend ALA’s Annual Conference in Chicago.
The I Love My Librarian Award is sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, with additional support from the New York Public Library, and is administered by the American Library Association. Since 2008, library users have shared more than 25,000 nominations detailing how librarians have gone above and beyond to promote literacy, expand access to technology, and support diversity and inclusion in their communities.
