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Summer Recap 2025
Hello, library community!
The Library Check-in is a newsletter that shares news, event highlights, and happenings from across the Prince George's County Memorial Library System (PGCMLS). This page showcases general features from across the library system that made this past season unforgettable.
"Local Look-Back" of programs and initiatives from each of the system’s 20 locations can be found here.
To stay up to date on all things relevant to the Library, be sure to follow us on social media (@PGCMLS), or by clicking the social icons in the footer of the webpage. Thank you for being a part of this wonderful community — dive in and enjoy!
Another Successful Summer Prince George’s in the Books!
On August 14, the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System (PGCMLS) wrapped another terrific Summer Prince George’s season. More than 4,000 customers registered for this year’s reading and program attendance challenge, logging a combined total of 1,698,680 minutes read!
1,834 participants ended up completing the challenge, earning T-shirts provided by the PGCMLS Foundation and baseball tickets provided by the Washington Nationals. Thanks to a late-summer contribution coordinated by the Maryland State Library Agency, all Summer Prince George’s participants were also given the random chance to win free tickets to the Maryland State Fair, the Maryland Science Center, and the National Aquarium.
Huge kudos, as always, go to the Library’s stalwart staff, who not only aced this year’s “Color Our World” theme on the branch decoration level, but who also hosted 1,380 total Summer Prince George’s programs across the system’s 19 branches, which saw a total of 26,245 individual attendees.
The Library Welcomes County Executive Braveboy and Her Team!
This summer, PGCMLS counted a total of more than 670,000 registered library cardholders. The Library was proud to to welcome County Executive Aisha Braveboy's new administration during that same period, and just as proud to add new Prince George’s County Deputy Chief Administrative Officer (DCAO) Brian Wilbon to the system’s growing cardholder number when he joined us at the Largo-Kettering branch to register for a new library card — and just in time for September’s National Library Card Sign-Up Month! PGCMLS looks forward to further collaboration with the new County Executive’s team to continue to increase the county’s library user base.
Olympic Artist Jesse Raudales Brings the Therapeutic Power of Art to Young Adults at the Hyattsville Branch Library
Throughout July, the Hyattsville Branch Library hosted an intensive “Therapy Through Art” program for teens and young adults. The series was led by Upper Marlboro’s own Jesse Raudales, an “Olympic Artist” who was commissioned by the U.S Olympic Committee to create a painting to commemorate the 2006 U.S. Olympic Team, and who now runs programs like these for young adults across the country.
Funded through an Urban Libraries Council grant, Raudales’ program was designed to give emerging adults in Prince George’s County the opportunity to get professional-level art instruction, for free, in an atmosphere designed to cultivate emotional support, camaraderie, and mutual respect. It also let the participating young artists push beyond their creative comfort zones, as it shifted mediums and subjects from one class to the next.
Atiya K., a rising Frederick Douglass High School senior, counted herself among this group. “Art is my life,” she shared during the watercolor landscape session. “I really wanted to push myself this summer to try new things and work on skills I’m not so familiar with, so I was excited to get to sign up for this class.”
Just as important as the artistic instruction was the feeling of calm and support that Jesse and his co-presenters cultivated in the room. Students also supported and encouraged each other.
One of the most notable things about this summer’s “Therapy Through Art” program, though, was how densely packed it was with genuine artistic talent.
“Most [of my] classes will have one or two good artists,” says Raudales, who has been doing this kind of work for decades, and who has been invited by PlayLA to organize the exact same program during the 2028 LA Olympics. “But this one, you can tell that at least 80 percent of them are just excellent. It’s so exciting to see their creativity [thrive].”
Raudales went all out to showcase his students’ final paintings at a gala opening at the Hyattsville Branch Library on August 2. Opening with a red carpet photo moment, the Saturday event included welcoming remarks from PGCMLS Chief Operating Officer Megan Sutherland and Ashanti Martinez, Maryland State Delegate (District 22). Following those remarks, Jesse presented each of the participants with certificates of completion, swag bags, and citations of excellence from Delegate Martinez.
After these official proceedings, family, friends, and community members were invited to tour the exhibit and engage with the artwork directly. The student artists got the opportunity to talk about their work with the public, and also to connect with the other local elected officials and community stakeholders who had come out to support them, including Betsy Ramirez, education liaison for new Prince George’s County Executive Aisha Braveboy; Hyattsville City Councilmembers Joanne Waszczak, Gopi Dhokai, and Kelson Nisbett; Omar Eaton-Martinez, senior vice president for Historic Sites at the National Trust for Historic Preservation; and Corey Lewis, assistant state archivist at the Maryland State Archives.
For more photos, check out the “Therapy Through Art” program and exhibit albums on the Library’s Flickr page!
The PGCMLS Book Crawl: Summer Fun for Adults
On a Tuesday evening in early August, PGCMLS hosted its fifth and final “Book Crawl” event of the summer: an “After-Hours Book Fair” at miXt Food Hall in Hyattsville.
Organized purposefully to invoke fond memories of elementary school, the "After-Hours Book Fair" was a collaborative production of branch and administration staff. The event included board and video games on the ground floor, as well as a Scholastic-style book fair in the upstairs gallery space — the latter complete with stickers, scented pencils, and cute gummy erasers that attendees could “buy” with the 10 free tickets they were given at registration.
PGCMLS hosts a wide variety of programs for adults, including computer skills courses, career development events, book discussions, and film screenings. But the “Book Crawl” series brings that nostalgic sense of library fun directly into the community. From the raucous joy of “Pride Bingo” with Charlemagne Chateau to the highs (and basso lows) of “Name that Tune,” the PGCMLS “Book Crawl” series is designed specifically to give Prince George’s adults the same “Summer Prince George’s” fun as their kid, teen, and family neighbors.
“When we started the ‘Book Crawl’ back in 2021, it was a way to engage with millennial age adults in the time of COVID,” says PGCMLS Teen Services Specialist Isaiah West, who was part of the team that developed this initiative. The goal back then was modest: to get 20-30 adults coming to hang out with Library staff at cool businesses around the county to play trivia, name that tune, and bingo.
This year, Isaiah reports, nearly every event was at capacity — and many customers who came to one event on a whim had such a good time, they came back for a second! One couple who came to “Name That Tune” at the New Deal Cafe after falling in love with miXt Food Hall’s “Bingo Night” told Isaiah that while they were sad to have missed earlier events in the series, they were excited that the “Book Crawl” had introduced them to cool venues in the county. In fact, they were already planning to bring their friends back to the New Deal Cafe for an upcoming concert!
“That is what we wanted this to be when we started it: a place to engage with patrons we don't normally see, while introducing them to a new business in the community,” says Isaiah. “This year, I think we did just that. We saw so many repeats, but we also met brand new people who were excited about what the library had to offer — and to have a night out with friends!”
For more photos from the “After-Hours Book Fair,” check out the PGCMLS Flickr!
By The Numbers: Summer 2025 Stats
Library Luminaries
The Library is pleased to use “The Library Check-In” to shine a spotlight on our library colleagues, both within PGCMLS and across the wider DMV Library landscape. In this edition, we are spotlighting Baltimore School Librarian Tatanisha “Tiki” Love.
LIS Spotlight: Tatanisha “Tiki” Love, School Library Journal’s “School Librarian of the Year” 2025 Finalist
PGCMLS is proud to support our school librarian colleagues across the state, who strive every day to provide Maryland’s students with equitable access to information, resources, and opportunities. The Library is especially excited that Maryland’s own Tatanisha “Tiki” Love, the librarian for the Southwest Academy Magnet School for Science and Engineering in Baltimore, was recently named “School Librarian of the Year Finalist” by the School Library Journal.
Love approaches her work with the goal of making the school library a space that students seek to spend time in. This means curating a robust collection of graphic novels and manga, creating a compelling STEM-related curriculum, and building out a “Book Matching” program to get the perfect book in every student’s hands. Read more about Love’s work in the School Library Journal.
A Booming Summer Partnership Between the Hillcrest Heights Branch Library and the Judy Center
As Public Service Specialist Daniel Hampton reports, the Hillcrest Heights Branch Library saw a lot of new faces and energy pour into the branch this summer. Not only did the branch welcome customers from the Spauldings and Oxon Hill communities while those branches were temporarily closed, but it also played host to the Hillcrest Heights Elementary School’s Judy Center program while the school was under renovation.
The Prince George’s County Public Schools (PGCPS) Judy Center Early Learning Hub program helps families prepare for school success by providing early learning experiences for parents and their young children. Both Judy Center families and Library families participated in the Hillcrest Heights Branch Library program this summer — and thanks to this partnership, the branch’s program attendance nearly tripled, going from around 100 participants per month to over 500 participants per month in July alone.
With so many of those families returning for storytime and other early reading programs, the branch also saw a huge boost to their early literacy numbers.
“It has felt really good to be able to step in [...] and meet the needs of the community,” says Daniel. “We are small, but we are mighty — and we [have been] able to help people who didn’t even know where our branch even was just discover us.”
“Molly of Denali” Closes Out a Year of Successful ELMA Programs WEB ONLY
As part of the inaugural run of the grant-funded Early Learning Media Ambassadors (ELMA) program from the Maryland Center for Media Literacy and Education, three PGCMLS staff members have spent the last year developing and presenting a series of fun PBS-focused programs for Prince George’s families.
To complete their official ELMA training, these three staff members — Shannon Young from the Surratts-Clinton Branch Library, Tamika Gaskins from the Largo-Kettering Branch Library, and Kelly Holley-Poole from Technical Services — were tasked with organizing a total of five family media literacy programs geared towards families with kids ages 2-8.
The programs ran at the Laurel, Surratts-Clinton, Bowie, Fairmount Heights, and New Carrollton branch libraries, and gave PGCMLS’ first ELMA team the chance to educate parents about media literacy, and how to select age-appropriate media for their kids.
“Basically, our goal was to reinforce the idea that it’s important for parents to engage with their kids about the media they are taking in,” explains Shannon. This is a critical element of finding media that promotes strong computational, social, and critical thinking skills.
The final program, which took place at the New Carrollton Branch Library on August 11, featured a screening of a “Molly of Denali” episode called “Suki’s Bone.” At the end of the 10-minute video, families had time to reflect together on what they had watched. Then the ELMA Ambassadors invited the kids to work their way through a series of activity stations, which included two crafts, two outdoor activities, and time with some iPads that were preloaded with a variety of PBS-themed apps.
“It was a great final program,” Shannon says. She estimates that about five families attended, and says that the parents and kids were really engaged the whole time.
Congratulations to All the Teens Who Completed PGCMLS’ 4th Annual Social Justice Camp!
Throughout one intensive week in late July, nine teens from across Prince George’s County joined a multi-departmental cohort of PGCMLS and Prince George’s County Office of Human Rights (PGCOHR) mentors to learn about the history of social justice movements, how to discern good and bad information, and how to turn their values into action.
Led by PGCMLS Teen Services Specialist Isaiah West — who was named a 2024 “Mover & Shaker” by Library Journal as a result of his work on this program — Social Justice Camp is one of the Library’s flagship teen initiatives. A collaborative project of PGCMLS staff members across the system, and run in partnership with PGCOHR since 2024, the camp rotates to a new branch each summer. This year, it landed at the newly renovated Surratts-Clinton Branch Library, where participating teens spent the week learning activist history and skills. On the final day of the program, they turned that learning into planning, developing pitches for social justice projects that spoke to issues close to their hearts. They then presented these to a panel of judges representing both the Library and the Office of Human Rights. These pitches covered everything from clean water to prison reform to greater community support for LGBTQ+ youth.
Judges were given a pile of neon green “Social Justice Camp bucks” to distribute to the teens after their pitches, but the true prize for this year’s teen cohort was the confidence gained in their own social activist skillset.
PGCMLS Partner Spotlight
Random Unselfish Acts of Kindness
PGCMLS is proud to partner with an array of organizations who do important work in the Prince George’s community. For this Library Check-In, we are shining the spotlight on Random Unselfish Acts of Kindness (RUAK), a Greenbelt organization whose founder, Robert Goldberg-Strassler, was recently recognized as Greenbelt’s 2025 Outstanding Citizen.
RUAK was founded in 2017 to foster community connections in the Greenbelt Community. One main pillar of RUAK’s work is the “Uplift Literacy” program, which is designed to facilitate greater access to early childhood literacy for Greenbelt families, largely through a monthly dual-language “Pre-K Story Hour” with the Greenbelt Branch Library that brings library storytime services directly into the community. At these programs, kids also get free books, snacks, and access to fun activities like scavenger hunts and active play in the gym.
“We want to expose the kids to experiences they might not get elsewhere,” says Goldberg-Strassler. “We also tell them about the Laurel Dinosaur Park, the Patuxent Research Refuge, Watkins Park… all these places around the county that are free, but that families might not know about.”
At the September storytime, which featured “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom” in both English and French, families from a wide variety of backgrounds gathered to enjoy stories, sing, and dance. Grandparents were there with their grandchildren. Parents with babies in strollers sat in the back as their older kids ran to sit on the carpets in front of the storytelling chair. And then when storytime was over, families speaking Spanish, English, and more lined up at the tables where RUAK volunteers were giving away free children’s books.
“For me, it’s so important that it was us neighbors who made this happen,” says Jennifer Dudley, President of the Greenbelt Rotary and a founding RUAK volunteer. “And then to see the impact this opportunity has on these families, to see the kids just shine when they pick out their books — it’s become a part of our routine to watch these families grow. That’s the beautiful thing about the library: it connects us to learning, and to each other.”
Resource Spotlight: Biblio Consulta
Biblio Consulta: A Spanish Language Phone Reference Service
Este es un servicio de referencia telefónica gratuita en el cual puede hablar directamente con un bibliotecario en español, encontrará una amplia variedad de información sobre los servicios en la biblioteca incluidas preguntas sobre cómo solicitar un pasaporte estadounidense; el servicio es proporcionado por personal de las bibliotecas de PGCMLS que habla español con fluidez, en los horarios de atención al público.
A free one-on-one reference telephone service providing a diverse range of information help in Spanish, including questions about applying for a U.S. passport; the service is provided by PGCMLS library staff fluent in Spanish, when the Library is open.
PGCMLS in the News
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“CTV News 8/7/25,” Prince George’s County Television
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“Back-to-school giveaways, freebies in the DC area for students, teachers and families,” WTOP.com
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“A chance to touch a truck, helicopter and more,” The Laurel Independent (Streetcar Suburbs News)
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“Inclusive by Design: Pride Programming in 2025,” Public Libraries Online (A Publication of the Public Library Association)
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“Art acts as therapy for local ‘emerging adults,” Hyattsville Life & Times (Streetcar Suburbs News)
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“YSD Newsletter: Summer 2025,” Youth Services Division of Maryland Library Association
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“Hot Days, Hotter Topics | ALA Annual 2025,” Library Journal
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“No A/C, no answers: Tenants struggle in Laurel apartment with no A/C during heat wave,” FOX 5 DC Evening Broadcast
Industry News & Recommended Reads
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Recommended Read: “Parks & Rec & Libraries” (Library Journal)
“[I]n recent years public libraries have found a range of ways to partner with local Parks & Recreation agencies, state parks, and even federal parks to bring residents to green spaces—and bring nature-based programs into libraries as well.”
PGCMLS connection: Branches across the PGCMLS system regularly partner with the Maryland-National Capital Park Planning Commission (M-NCPPC), the Prince George’s County Department of Parks and Recreation, Echoes of Nature, and other local parks-adjacent organizations to provide fun nature-based programs for Library customers. To experience one of these programs yourself, join the Laurel Branch Library on October 18 for a “Planting Pollinator Gardens” program, in collaboration with the Patuxent Research Refuge!
Thank You to the PGCMLS Foundation for its Ongoing Support!
This summer the PGCMLS Foundation donated “Color Our World” T-shirts for all Summer Prince George’s challenge participants. Thank you, Foundation!
To contribute to the PGCMLS Foundation’s ongoing efforts to support the work of the Library, you can make a one-time or recurring donation here.
Local Look-Backs
New Carrollton Branch Library Brings “Family Movie & a Craft” Sparkle to Summer Meals Program
At the New Carrollton Branch Library this past summer, New Carrollton Library Associate Claudia Parra organized a bonus treat for community members who came in for the “Summer Meals” program: a curated “Family Movie & a Craft” series!
Featuring a mix of animated films both new and old that Claudia paired with fun, simple crafts that kids and parents could do together, this programming series saw families return week after week, with kids excited to dive into whatever activity Claudia had planned. It also let the New Carrollton branch staff show off what makes public libraries so vital, facilitating access not just to resources and services like the county’s free summer lunch program, but also to interactive, socially engaging learning opportunities — and all of that in a safe and welcoming community space.
“I wanted the community to be able to make good use of [both] the summer meals and the resources we have [at the Library],” explains Claudia, who first developed the bonus program in 2024 as a way to entice more community members to come in during the summer months. “We know that people really need those lunches, but that they don't always know what's going on at the library, so I thought this would be a good way to promote both.”
Customers shared their appreciation of the program with Claudia throughout the summer. Everyone was happy for the free lunches, but they also appreciated how it was a nice cool break from the summer heat, or that it was somewhere they could bring grandkids who were visiting for the summer. Says Claudia, “I was happy to hold this safe space for them — to have the community making good use of our resources, making new friends, and just experiencing the joy of a simple craft, all in this shared space.”
Library Check-In Archive
In addition to the version that goes out to all PGCMLS cardholders (linked in PDF form above), the Library Check-In is further tailored to reflect "local look-back" stories within the specific geographies of the nine County Council and eight Maryland General Assembly Districts that cover Prince George's County. PDF versions of those targeted newsletters can be found below.
Subscribe to Library "The Library Check-In" and other email updates!
