Merri Lindgren

Merri V. Lindgren is a librarian at the Cooperative Children’s Book Center of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Merri was the editor of The Multicolored Mirror: Cultural Substance in Literature for Children and Young Adults (Highsmith, 1991), and a former columnist for the Wisconsin State Journal, writing about children’s books. She has coauthored numerous editions of the annual CCBC Choices publication both in the early 1990s and since the 2002 edition. Among Merri’s other responsibilites at the CCBC, she manages the logging of multicultural books for the library’s annual statistics of books by and about people of color and First/Native Nations. She is currently serving on the American Library Association/Association for Library Service to Children 2018 Laura Ingalls Wilder Committee. She is a past member of the ALA/ALSC Notable Children’s Recordings committee (2015); was a member of the ALA/ALSC 2010 Caldecott Award Committee, and was a member ALA’s first Odyssey Award Committee (2008), a joint award of ALSC and the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA). She has chaired the Charlotte Zolotow Award committee (administered by the CCBC) seven times, most recently for the 2017 award. Merri has worked as a youth services librarian at the Helen M. Plum Memorial Library in Lombard, Illinois, and as an instructor of Adolescent and Young Adult Literature at Edgewood College. She is a former trustee of the Baraboo (Wisconsin) Public Library. Merri graduated from UW–Madison with a B.A. Degree in Psychology and has a Master’s Degree in Library and Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.