{"id":305072,"date":"2025-10-15T10:10:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T10:10:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/305072\/"},"modified":"2025-10-15T10:10:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T10:10:11","slug":"chicago-library-honors-percival-everett-mary-dempsey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/305072\/","title":{"rendered":"Chicago Library honors Percival Everett, Mary Dempsey"},"content":{"rendered":"

Twenty-five years. That\u2019s how long the Chicago Public Library Foundation Awards have been honoring writers, artists and local changemakers. In a quarter of a century, the honorees have been many.<\/p>\n

This year, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Percival Everett is receiving the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, Calumet City poet Jos\u00e9 Olivarez is the recipient of the 21st Century Award and Mary Dempsey, former commissioner of the Chicago Public Library, is taking home the Civic Award.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt does kind of feel like fate \u2026 when we identify what it means to lift up an author in a certain moment in time,\u201d CPLF president and CEO Brenda Langstraat Bui said about the choice of the awardees.<\/p>\n

On Percival Everett<\/a>: \u201cThis is the first time that somebody is receiving the Sandburg award in the same year they won the Pulitzer. He\u2019s such a prolific author; the narrative of the library is always in his work. His characters explore libraries, have this curiosity, this understanding of what it means to learn. This is a moment where this book (\u2018James\u2019) needs to be lifted up.\u201d<\/p>\n

We spoke with Olivarez and Dempsey, Chicago-area natives, ahead of the Oct. 21 award ceremony. The following conversations have been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n

Jos\u00e9 Olivarez<\/p>\n

Olivarez, the son of Mexican immigrants, graduated from Harvard University and lives in Jersey City, New Jersey. A marketing manager of Young Chicago Authors, his two collections of poems are \u201cCitizen Illegal<\/a>\u201d and \u201cPromises of Gold.\u201d His work has been long-listed for a National Book Award, a finalist for the PEN\/Jean Stein Book Award and was a winner of the Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. A recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation in 2019, Olivarez is hoping his first novel \u2014 one on reverse migration \u2014 will hit shelves in the fall of 2026.<\/p>\n

\"PoetPoet and Calumet City native Jos\u00e9 Olivarez.<\/p>\n

Q: What does it mean to get this award now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A: I lost my mind. For me, this is the most meaningful award that I\u2019ve received. To be recognized by the Chicago Public Library Foundation, for it to be home, it means everything to me, especially because I spent so many hours as a child at the library. To have it come full circle like this\u2026 I couldn\u2019t believe it. Growing up, my parents were undocumented for a long time, and a lot of what I write about is what it means to be living in the United States and not have the full protection of the state that one might expect here. To receive this award in this particular moment, I\u2019m thinking about how I can continue to make my writing sharper, offer words that are meaningful for the communities and the people that I love to keep them inspired and insisting that there will be a day after this \u2014 we will continue to fight, plant our roots and make Chicago the beautiful city that it is.<\/p>\n

Q: In your first poem collection, we are introduced to the poem \u201cMexican Heaven.\u201d You revisit it in your recent collection. Why do you keep coming back to it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A: My initial inspiration was, I wanted to find a way to write about immigration the United States, but I didn\u2019t want to do it straightforwardly. One day, it hit me, \u2018what\u2019s another place that promises to be perfect when you get there, but there are gates and there\u2019s someone holding a list to check to see if your name is on it?\u2019 That classical interpretation of heaven also has a border\u2026 it was a way to write about the United States, and a way to mischievously play with some of the classical figures in Christian theology. I love the idea that Jesus, Lord and Savior, gets reborn in the palms every day as Jesus, who\u2019s just your cousin from down the street, and he\u2019s got a big back tattoo. To me, it makes sense. Why shouldn\u2019t we treat each other as though we have that kind of holiness and special features about us? Why shouldn\u2019t we treat each other like we are all the children of God? It is my favorite poem I\u2019ve ever written. \u2018Mexican Heaven\u2019 exists not only in the first collection, but in the second collection, because it\u2019s one of those imaginative places like Chicago that I can come back to and reassess how I\u2019m feeling about the world and about the people that I love in this very creative and generative way.<\/p>\n

Mary Dempsey<\/p>\n

Reared in Hillside, Dempsey has had many roles in life \u2014 librarian, lawyer, and president of DePaul College Prep and the Philip H. Corboy Foundation. From 1994 to 2012, she served as Commissioner of the Chicago Public Library<\/a> where she was responsible for the construction of 44 neighborhood branch libraries (currently there are 81 branches).<\/p>\n

\u201cA place of lifelong learning for the people \u2014 that\u2019s what a library is. Libraries are the centerpiece of democracy. They are the people\u2019s university, and thanks to the leadership of Mayor Daley and his support, we were able to bring that to so many neighborhoods in Chicago,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

During her tenure, she introduced programs and technology that still resonate \u2014 such as One Book, One Chicago and the YOUmedia initiative. To this day, Dempsey considers working in public service a privilege.<\/p>\n

Q: One Book, One Chicago and YOUmedia started while you were commissioner. What\u2019s the next iteration of the Dempsey CPL legacy?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A: I can talk to the CPL legacy, and that is, it is more relevant than ever, because libraries still serve as a great third place where people gather \u2014 where people can come together with differing ideas or similar ideas and interact. They\u2019re not judgmental. Everybody\u2019s welcome to use the resources as they see fit \u2026 serving as community anchors in every single neighborhood in Chicago. We all have our library story. We can all remember what it meant to us when we got our library card, how important it was for each and every one of us to say, no one\u2019s going to judge me because I want to read this, as opposed to that. And it hasn\u2019t changed. (All CPS students receive a library card.)<\/p>\n

Q: In these unprecedented times, where places of learning are under attack, what advice do you have?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A: You have to be clear about what your mission is and collaborate with others to determine how best to achieve that mission in a way that you may have to shift, especially if resources are trimmed. How do you make your mission attractive to people who have the ability to perhaps assist financially or in other ways, politically? We can\u2019t control everything, but we can control our little piece. We\u2019re all being challenged right now, are we up to the challenge? Are we willing to work together as a city, as people from every different corner of the city, to say, \u2018This matters to me. You matter to me. This institution matters to me. The person down the block matters to me. I am my brother\u2019s keeper?\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Twenty-five years. That\u2019s how long the Chicago Public Library Foundation Awards have been honoring writers, artists and local…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":305073,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[1022,960,5386,1818,1370,1072],"class_list":{"0":"post-305072","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-chicago","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-illinois","12":"tag-latest-headlines","13":"tag-things-to-do"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115377644173642614","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305072\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/305073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}