Next to running in the park with my two best friends, spending time at the small library on the corner of my street was my favorite thing to do in the summer when I was growing up. My girlfriends and I would go there almost every other day to get a pile of books to read at some comfortable place, often a park about a mile away. We were into bike riding, too. Fast-forward a lot of years to when I started my writing career as a journalist. Then I wasn’t just going to the library to get books to read for myself or for my kids. This was a time when I relied heavily on libraries, and the wonderful reference librarians, to help me when I needed facts and figures for articles and my nonfiction books. (Kudos to the librarians at the Plano Public Library. They saved my bacon more than once.) During that time I wrote nine books for  Rosen Publishing that included Coping With Weapons and Violence in School and on your Streets, and the librarians proved invaluable in steering me towar...

Woodland Park Library, Teller County, CO This is National Library Week. Do you love libraries? I know I do. When I was a child, my parents told everyone we had to move because I'd finished the local library. Okay, so maybe only the children's section, but I was an avid reader and loved our trips to the John C. Fremont Library in Los Angeles. We were allowed to check out ten books, and it was all I could do to carry them. Sadly, our new home wasn't as close to a library, and I was busy with school—but the school did have a library, and in junior high I chose "library service" as one of my electives. I got to spend an hour a day surrounded by books. Years later, we moved to Florida, and I instilled the library habit in my kids. I can still remember how they'd arrive home with their piles of books and say they'd already finished some of them. And yes, they were little, and the books were mostly pictures, but all of my kids seemed to emerge from the wo...