Lisa Yee Swope of Bookmarks in Winston-Salem, N.C., and Bonnie Shank of the Storybook Shoppe in Bluffton, S.C., are the 2020 recipients of the Nancy Olson Bookseller Award. The award honors Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance booksellers who embody the spirit of the late Nancy Olson, founder of Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh, N.C., in supporting writers--especially new writers--other booksellers and community outreach; it has a $2,000 cash prize and was begun by an anonymous author.
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| Lisa Yee Swope | |
Swope joined Bookmarks three years ago as it was shifting from an annual book festival to a bricks-and-mortar bookstore with year-round programming. She is a frontline bookseller and manages the Bookmarks Kids Club, a subscription service for kids in which she gets to individually pick books for dozens of children, allowing her to form ongoing relationships with the families in the community and the grandparents, aunts and uncles in the community who have littles they love in and out of area. Swope said, "I am delighted that the Bookmarks community sees and lauds my exuberance for sharing the things I love. It's a daily joy to be part of a great org that is making such a difference in our schools and community."
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| Bonnie Shank | |
Shank joined the Storybook Shoppe nine years ago, after a 34-year career as an English and Language Arts teacher in the Department of Defense school system, living and teaching in Panama, Okinawa, Japan and Germany. She said, "Each day in the bookstore is a ray of sunshine surrounded by books and helping parents, grandparents, and children find the right book. Nothing is better than hearing a mother or grandmother say their children devour books. This morning a grandfather came in and was looking for a Christmas book to read to his two- and four-year-old grandchildren through Skype. What fun it was to help him pick the perfect book to share."
Judges for the award were Nancy Olson's husband, Jim Olson; Sarah Goddin, buyer and former general manager of Quail Ridge Books; and Linda-Marie Barrett, executive director of SIBA.
Olson said, "Nancy would have loved this. She was a champion of other bookstores and would have loved to have seen booksellers so generously rewarded and acknowledged for the work they do for their communities."
Barrett added: "We received an amazing set of nominations this year. There were so many wonderful booksellers making such a difference in their communities; it was incredibly difficult to select just two."