Oralia Garza de Cortes
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Oralia Garza de Cortes | |
|---|---|
| Occupations | Librarian, advocate, and scholar |
Oralia Garza de Cortes is a librarian, advocate, bibliographer, and scholar. She has been honored by REFORMA with the Lifetime Achievement Award which recognizes excellence in librarianship over a career for one who has made significant and lasting contributions to Latino and Spanish-speaking communities.[1]
She served as the president of REFORMA from 2000 to 2001.[2] She is also a cofounder with Sandra Rios Balderrama [3] of the Pura Belpré Award, named after New York Public Library's first Latina librarian, which honors outstanding Latino authors and illustrators who create works for children. She holds a Master's of Library and Information Science from the University of Texas at Austin, obtained in 1988.[4]
She currently works Austin, Texas as a Latino Children's Literature Consultant. She works to ensure equity of access to books, library services, and book publishing. Specifically, Garza de Cortes advocates for Latino children's access and publishing standards for books written by and featuring Latino protagonists and storylines. However, Garza de Cortes works to represent marginalized and disadvantaged children outside of the Latino community as well. She has worked toward providing information access and literacy advocacy for child refugees recently, and spoke about this work at the 2016 ALA annual conference in Orlando, Florida.[5] Garza de Cortes has served on the Caldecott Committee in the year 2000 and the board of directors of Association for Library Service to Children, and was the first Latina in either of those positions.
