Contemporary Authors

PERSONAL

Born February 11, 1954.

University of Texas, Austin, Ph.D., 1996.

ADDRESS

CAREER

Academic and librarian. Has worked as an academic librarian in MI and TX; University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, associate professor, 2001–.

Methodology Paper Competition winner, Association for Library and Information Science Education; Justin Winsor Prize, Library History Round Table of the American Library Association; Lillian Smith Book Award and Eliza Atkins Gleason Book Award, both for Not Free, Not for All.

WRITINGS

• Gender, Unpaid Labor, and the Promotion of Literacy: A Selected, Annotated Bibliography, Garland (New York, NY), 1987
• (With others) Creating the Digital Library: A Special Report, Primary Research Group (New York, NY), 2000
• (Editor, with Hermina G.B. Anghelescu and John Mark Tucker) Libraries & Culture: Historical Essays Honoring the Legacy of Donald G. Davis, Jr., Library of Congress, Center for the Book (Washington, DC), 2006
• Not Free, Not for All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow, University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst, MA), 2015
• Find the Information You Need! Resources and Techniques for Making Decisions, Solving problems, and Answering Questions, Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, MD), 2016

Contributor to academic journals, including Library Trends, Reference Librarian, Knowledge Organization, the Journal of Government Information, the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Information Society, and Library Quarterly.

SIDELIGHTS

Cheryl Knott is an academic. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Texas, Austin, in 1996 and worked as an academic librarian in Michigan and Texas. Knott began working at the University of Arizona in 2001, eventually becoming an associate professor. Her research interests include the history of public libraries, the segregation of public libraries, and the history of print culture in the environmental movement. Knott has published in a number of academic journals, including Library Trends, Reference Librarian, Knowledge Organization, the Journal of Government Information, the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Information Society, and Library Quarterly.

Knott published Not Free, Not for All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow in 2015. The account received both the Lillian Smith Book Award and the Eliza Atkins Gleason Book Award. The account looks into the way public libraries became more welcoming to the general public by renovating their internal infrastructure and creating spaces for general interest and children. This open period did not, however, extend to African Americans, who were restricted or refused outright by librarians and the institutions they represented during the era of Jim Crow laws. Knott challenges histories on public libraries in the United States by arguing that their “free to all” period was, in fact, quite the opposite. The book highlights discriminatory policies and systemic racism and also the way in which white, middle-class women created public libraries as white spaces. Knott also describes the segregated public library collections and services that African-Americans designed and how many public libraries were slow to dismantle this system in the 1950s and 1960s when public facilities were ordered to desegregate.

Writing in the Journal of Southern History, Gordon K. Mantler suggested that “perhaps the book’s most satisfying moments reflect ‘African American agency in both the creation of Jim Crow libraries and their demise’ (p. 4). Sprinkled throughout Knott’s analysis are brief stories of African Americans who acted.” Mantler cautioned, though, that “the book may have limited utility for those most interested in the freedom struggle because there are not enough of these accounts.” Nevertheless, Mantler labeled the account “an important contribution” to literature on the Jim Crow era.

Reviewing the book in Choice, D. Pan “recommended” Not Free, Not for All, calling it “an important reinterpretation of public-library collections and services for African Americans in the South during the Jim Crow era.” In a review in Information & Culture: A Journal of History, Patrick M. Valentine summarized that “studies on black use of public libraries have advanced far in recent decades. More remains to be done in examining the role of small rural libraries and especially of measuring library impact on the lives of individuals, but Cheryl Knott has shown the way forward in a sophisticated and comprehensive work written with care and charm.”

BIOCRIT

PERIODICALS

• Choice, October 1, 2016, D. Pan, review of Not Free, Not for All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow, p. 195.

• Information & Culture: A Journal of History, 2016, Patrick M. Valentine, review of Not Free, Not for All.

• Journal of American Culture, 2017, Martin J. Manning, review of Not Free, Not for All, p. 290.

• Journal of American History, 2017, Lawrence Jackson, review of Not Free, Not for All, pp. 226-227.

• Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2017, Kenneth W. Goings, review of Not Free, Not for All, p. 432-433.

• Journal of Southern History, May 1, 2017, Gordon K. Mantler, review of Not Free, Not for All, p. 452.

ONLINE

• ORCID, https://orcid.org/ (November 19, 2017), author profile.

• University of Arizona Website, https://www.arizona.edu/ (November 19, 2017), author profile.

• University of Massachusetts Press Website, https://www.umass.edu/umpress/ (June 27, 2016), “Cheryl Knott Honored with Two Book Awards.”