LLAMA 2011 Team N Emerging Leaders' Bios
We thought we would tell you a little bit about ourselves and not just the great opportunity ALA Emerging Leaders and LLAMA gave us. Melissa Barger-Brisbin
Melissa Barger-Brisbin has been with the Cape May County Public Library for almost five years, three of which she has been a Media Librarian. She is in-charge of collection development for audiobooks, Playaways, music, and eBooks for all of the library's eight branches. She publishes a quarterly Media Newsletter, blogs regularly for the library, and assists in overseeing the CMCL's Circulation Department. As of last November she also took over Southern New Jersey's OverDrive account, and now purchases downloadable audiobooks and eBooks for seven counties in the state. Melissa completed her MLIS from Drexel University in 2009. She attained her BA in Literature from Richard Stockton College in 1999. In addition to collection development, Melissa recently launched a QR program for the Cape May County Library system for free eBooks and regularly teaches classes to the public on how to download eBooks to their mobile devices and eReaders. In 2011, she was selected as an ALA Emerging Leader. You can find her on Twitter: @melissabrisbin, Facebook: Melissa Barger-Brisbin, or my blog, I'm an e-Librarian.
 Melissa Cardenas-Dow
Melissa Cardenas-Dow works as a Technical Services/Reference Librarian at University of Redlands Armacost Library in Southern California. She received her MLIS from San José State University in 2008 and is currently working on a Certificate of Advanced Study in Digital Libraries from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Melissa is a participant in the American Library Association Emerging Leader program for the 2011 cohort. She is also serving as a member of the Continuing Education Committee of the North American Serials Interest Group for 2010-2013. Melissa will serve as the Library Leadership and Management Association’s representative to the Association of Specialized & Cooperative Library Agencies’ Accessibility Assembly for 2012. She received her BA from San Francisco State University in 1996 with a major in anthropology and a minor in Asian American Studies. Her current academic interests include universal design and equitable access to information, the Open Access movement in scholarly communication, learning through games, gaming and in multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs), participatory culture and media literacy, Filipino diaspora, and post-colonialism. When not taking part in academic and professional pursuits, Melissa can be found hanging out in Aerie Peak-US realm in World of Warcraft with the Libraries & Librarians guild. She has many avatars, but Linnar, her level 85 Night Elf female hunter is her favorite.
 Deana Greenfield
Deana Greenfield is an Assistant Professor at National Louis University Library in Chicago, IL. She previously held the position of library program manager for the NLU Center for Teaching through Children’s Books and served as General Secretary for the United States Board on Books for Young People (USBBY). Deana graduated from Grinnell College in 2000 with a degree in English (creative writing focus). She completed a MA degree and PhD coursework in English Literature at Northwestern University and received her MSLIS and Certificate in Rare Books and Special Collections from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In 2008 she was named an American Library Association Spectrum Scholar. Her current interests involve teaching and designing curriculum for credit courses in digital information literacy, mentoring new library and information science students, and serving as both an American Library Association Emerging Leader and Discovering Librarianship Field Recruiter. She still enjoys writing and recently received a Certificate in Creative Writing (Short Story) from the University of Chicago.
 Lessa Kanani’opua Pelayo-Lozada
Lessa Kanani’opua Pelayo-Lozada is a Part-Time Young Readers Librarian at Palos Verdes Library District and Part-Time Reference Librarian at Redodno Beach Public Library in Southern California. She received her MLIS in 2009 from University of California, Los Angeles after defending a thesis on how cultural information is retained and disseminated amongst the Southern California Native Hawaiian diaspora. She received a BA in Sociology also from UCLA in 2007. Recently, Lessa has been elected as Secretary of the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association (APALA) and is remaining for a second term as Co-Chair of the Family Literacy Task Force which created and maintains the program Talk Story: Sharing Culture, Sharing History with the American Indian Librarians Association (AILA). Lessa has also been a member of APALA’s Literature awards committee, serving on the 2011 Young Adult Literature, 2010 Picture Book, and 2009 Children’s Literature committees and has earned the honor of being their 2011 Emerging Leader as well as the 2010 recipient of the APALA Travel & Research grant. She is currently working with her husband on a book called Hawaiians in Los Angeles which chronicles the influence of Native Hawaiians and Local Hawaiian Culture on the Los Angeles area since the late 1950s. The book will be published by Arcadia Publishing and is due out in early 2012. In her free time, she dances hula and spends time with her farm of 2 dogs and 2 cats in San Pedro, California and blogs about the life of a part-time librarian with full-time goals as LessaLibrarian.
 Tinamarie Vella
Tinamarie Vella currently works at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism Research Center. Before coming to CUNY, she worked at the New York City Department of Youth and Community Development. She also worked for the Reading and Writing Center at Kingsborough Community College and the New York Society Library. She holds a master’s in library and information science from the Palmer School at Long Island University and another master’s in English from Brooklyn College. She currently serves as the Membership Chair for the New York Library Association (NYLA) New Members Roundtable, and she also serves as the legislative representative for NYLA Section on Management of Information Resources and Technology (SMART). She has been selected to participate in the American Library Association (ALA) Emerging Leaders program, she is one of 83 participants from across the nation. Please check the following link for more on her research and publications: http://tinamarievella.emurse.com/
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