Meet Tracey Reed! An RT Member Profile

By A. Faulkner

What is your role in the GLBTRT?

Member

What does the GLBTRT mean to you?

A place, within my work community, to focus on smaller and larger issues related to LGBTQ issues.

Are you involved in ALA in other ways?

Not at this moment. I have been in the past and might look to be in the future.

What professional work do you perform?

Public Library Branch Manager

What would you like to share about your personal life?

I’m the proud and the happy wife of Sue. We moved from Florida to right outside of Philadelphia, PA at the end of 2016 with our 2 rescue pups. We’re all happy to be out of the heat and humidity and really like the change of seasons. I grew up here, and while you can never really go home again, it’s wonderful to be back with family.

What are you most proud of?

Surviving building a new library, my wife’s breast cancer, and 4 moves (3 personal, one professional) in the span of 24 months. Moving and major illness are 2 of the most stressful things one can go through. And I’m a better person, and a better spouse, because of it.

Who inspires you?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Hillary Clinton. Eleanor Roosevelt. Meryl Streep. 

What are your goals? (Professional and/or personal.)

I just started a job as a Branch Manager, so my short-term professional goals are to learn as much as I can about my new place and grow as a librarian. It’s always fun and challenging to take on a new role.

My personal goals include learning how to skydive.

What do you think (or predict) is the future of libraries?

The basic, fundamental mission of libraries – to connect people with what they seek – will not change. What they seek may change; I see public library patrons looking for more places to meet others, create things, and be entertained and educated in different ways. We do this by making more community spaces, creative spaces, and different types of programming, as well as providing the books, magazines (both of these in print and digital formats), music and videos we’ve always provided. I also see public libraries continuing and expanding the role of being the repositories of the stories of their community. From digitally keeping and preserving the ephemera of history to providing the means to digitally record the sounds and stories of the community members, public libraries are expanding their role as archives of constant change.

In what direction would you like the GLBTRT to move in the future?

I don’t really have an answer for this. A lot of it depends on how the country and world moves.

If you could be transported into the fictional world of any book, where would you go?

Can’t say that I’d want to live in a book. I like the here and now.

What would be the title of your autobiography?

Finding the Crazy That Complements Mine

If you could only choose one song to play every time you entered a room for the rest of your life, what would it be?

Oh. No. I can’t do that. Music is one of my passions. I have too many that play in my head on any given day, hour, moment, to pick just one. That’s like the modern equivalent of a Desert Island Disc list. I could never do them, either.

If you could have a dinner party with 5 culturally or historically significant figures, living or dead, who would you invite?

Together???? That means there would have to be interesting conversation so: Eleanor Roosevelt, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sappho, Lilith, Ani DiFranco

What is the meaning of life?

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