The Minnesota Academic Innovator’s Award is an annual award that recognizes academic librarians or academic project teams who have made an outstanding recent contribution to advance the mission of an academic library in Minnesota through an innovative project, program, or service.
This year, ARLD is recognizing the outstanding work of Dawn Wing, Assistant Professor, Graphic Artist, and Reference Librarian at Metropolitan State University for her work amplifying marginalized and diverse voices in the library and in the local community.
Wing's work incorporating graphic novels, graphic narratives, comics, and zines into the library and the classroom is both important and impactful. This past year Wing also organized several Zoom library events including, "Characters Who Look Like Me,” "Literary CelebrAsians” with Ed Bok Lee and Mainhia Moua, and “Paper Party! Making Zines.”
As stated in one of Wing’s nomination letters, “Dawn's work is innovative because it has brought people together and supported continued, deep learning throughout the difficult circumstances of the pandemic.” And as another of Dawn’s nominators shared, "Her work is interdisciplinary, intersectional, multimedia, and pushes against some of the traditional boundaries of what is considered scholarly/academic work. Most importantly, Dawn helps people find and express their own voices in a time when doing so is more important than ever."
Wing accepted the 2021 Minnesota Academic Innovators Award at the ARLD Day Virtual Opening on April 30, 2021.
The award is sponsored by the Academic and Research Libraries Division (ARLD) of the Minnesota Library Association. ARLD is a division of the Minnesota Library Association and is also the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) chapter in Minnesota. ARLD’s purpose is to identify and seek solutions to mutual problems on the academic and research library level of librarianship, to improve services, to encourage development of librarians, and to stimulate cooperation among libraries.