About This Year's Conference

Voyages: Past, Present, and Visions of the Future

2022 commemorates the 100-year journey of the Hawaiʻi Library Association, as well as marks a time when libraries and library colleagues find themselves emerging into a post-COVID-19 pandemic world. These particular voyages have significantly shaped our library profession, and we acknowledge the diverse ways our library resources and services have developed, responded, and flourished due to our changing circumstances, and the needs and perspectives of our communities.

During the pandemic, I thought of the phrase: “be like water” to cope with the emergency circumstances laid before us when serving our library stakeholders, colleagues, and friends. Water, our beloved and sustaining life force, can shift, bend, flow, and change forms as it moves about in the world, facing different obstacles or sometimes no obstacles at all. Water can carve paths into canyons, carry us in its waves, and astonish us with its strength as well as its ferocious destruction. Or, water can calmly reflect the sky. What would water do in the face of barriers, and what does water do when allowed to flow freely?

The world’s oceans, streams, and rivers connect us near and far through journeys across the sea and back again. Water was here long before we were born, and our hope is that water will flow long after we are gone.

It is with this spirit that we celebrate our centennial year of the Hawaiʻi Library Association, with this year’s conference theme: Voyages:  Past, Present, and Visions of the Future. We invite you to join us in celebrating your stories and your experiences, to share your analyses of the past, your present projects and accomplishments, and your visions of the future of libraries, in Hawaiʻi and beyond.

-by Jenny Silbiger, HLA President

Meet Our Keynotes

Lessa Pelayo-Lozado

President
​American Library Association

Lessa Kanani’opua Pelayo-Lozada is the 2022-23 President of the American Library Association and Adult Services Assistant Manager at the Palos Verdes Library District in Southern California. She is a Past Executive Director and Past President of the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association (APALA). In 2022 she received the American Library Association Elizabeth Futas Catalyst for Change Award and was named a Library Journal Mover & Shaker in the advocacy category. Much of her work focuses on promoting and achieving equity, diversity, and inclusion in libraries and librarianship. She lives in San Pedro, California with her poet husband, Chrisitan Hanz Lozada and their menagerie of pets. Find out more about her at lessaforlibraries.com. 

Noʻu Revilla

Creative Writing Professor
​UH Mānoa

Noʻu Revilla (she/her) is an ʻŌiwi (Hawaiian) poet, performer, and educator. Born and raised with the Līlīlehua rain of Waiʻehu on the island of Maui, she currently lives and loves with the Līlīlehua rain of Pālolo valley on Oʻahu. Her debut book of poetry Ask the Brindled was selected by Rick Barot as a winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series. She has performed and facilitated workshops throughout Hawaiʻi and abroad. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa, where she teaches creative writing. She is a lifetime "slyly / reproductive" student of Haunani-Kay Trask.

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