The Librarian's Guide to Bibliotherapy

Judit H. Ward is a Science Librarian at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. In addition to providing reference, teaching library research, and hosting outreach programs, she promotes reading for mental health and wellness. In her previous position as the Director of Information Services at the Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies she developed “Reading for Recovery,” a bibliotherapy-inspired tool for people grappling with addiction as the recipient of an ALA Carnegie-Whitney Award in 2014. She has presented her research and practice related to guided reading from the librarian’s perspective both nationally and internationally. She is the author or co-author of over 150 articles and seven books, including two bibliotherapy readers in her native Hungarian. She received her MLIS from Rutgers, after earning a PhD in Linguistics and an MA in English and Hungarian Literature and Linguistics from the University of Debrecen, Hungary.

Nicholas A. Allred is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Fairfield University in Fairfield, CT. He holds an M.St. in English from Oxford University and a PhD in Literatures in English from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. His scholarly writing has appeared in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and the edited collection Scholarly Milton. While at Rutgers, he collaborated extensively with the Center of Alcohol Studies and Rutgers University Libraries on bibliotherapy-inspired projects and initiatives, including “Reading for Recovery”––a guided reading tool for people with addictions developed with funding from the ALA Carnegie-Whitney Award. He is currently at work on his first academic monograph, on connections between the prehistory of addiction and conceptions of fictional character in eighteenth-century British culture.