News & Blog

April is National Poetry Month and UCF Libraries is dashing forward with enthusiasm to celebrate.

Poetry Contests!

Sonnets – Submissions due by April 8, 2018 at 11:59 pm.
The sonnet is a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter, which employ one of several rhyme schemes and adhere to a tightly structured thematic organization. Sonnet styles via Academy of American Poets. Your submission can be on any subject.

Celebrating Libraries – Submissions due by April 15, 2018 at 11:59 pm
Poem of any style or length about library (general or specific)

Haiku by You – Submissions due by April 22, 2018 at 11:59 pm
“Haiku” is a traditional form of Japanese poetry. Haiku poems consist of 3 lines. The first and last lines of a Haiku have 5 syllables and the middle line has 7 syllables. The lines rarely rhyme.

Submit your poems here.

Contests are open to UCF students only.

Erasure Poetry

An Erasure Poetry table will be set up between the Circulation Desk and Reference Desk from April 2 – 6. Staff favorites will be displayed on the windows by the entrance and on library social media accounts.

Featured Poems

The UCF Libraries Tumblr account will feature daily poems which are favorites of library staff. Tag us in your favorites on Tumblr!

Our latest exhibit follows the history of bourbon from its roots in American frontier life to modern prominence as an internationally recognized spirit. As Scotch is a distinct product of Scotland and Canadian Whisky originates in Canada, bourbon is a product that is uniquely American. The exhibit includes materials from the library’s collection paired with a selection of distinct bourbon brands. Special thanks to Dr. Marissa Orlowski of Rosen College and the Sazerac Company Archives for contributing items. The exhibit will be on display through Spring 2018.

If you would like to read more about bourbon, check or request these books from the Rosen Library:

• • Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey: An American Heritage by Michael R. Veach
  • Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America’s Whiskey by Reid Mitenbuler
  • Bourbon: A History of the American Spirit by Dane Huckelbridge

Anyone else can’t wait for A Wrinkle in Time to come out in theaters? If you want to read the book before seeing the movie, you still have one week left! And we have SO many ways to read, watch, or listen to the story.

Original novel by Madeleine L’Engle

Graphic novel adapted by Hope Larson

Audio book performed by critically acclaimed actress Barbara Caruso

Video of Disney’s 2004 mini-series of the title

If you’d like to continue the adventures of the Murry family from A Wrinkle in Time, read these…

A Wind in the Door With Meg Murry’s help, the dragons her six-year-old brother saw in the vegetable garden play an important part in his struggle between life and death.

A Swiftly Tilting Planet The youngest of the Murry children must travel through time and space in a battle against an evil dictator who would destroy the entire universe.

Or if you’d just like to read more of Madeleine L’Engle’s work, check out…

The Young Unicorns A seventeen-year-old boy, former member of a tough New York gang, a blind and talented twelve-year-old musician, the Austin family, and Canon Tallis are among the key characters who become involved in a frightening and evil scheme relying on the ability of a refined laser to give complete power over people’s minds.

Two Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage This moving memoir documents a marriage of more than forty years between two gifted people, a long term marriage that was: “full of wonderful things, terrible things, joyous things, grievous things, but ours.”

And Both were Young Flip doesn’t think shell ever fit in at the Swiss boarding school. Besides being homesick for her father and Connecticut, she isn’t sophisticated like the other girls, and discussions about boys leave her tongue-tied. Her happiest times are spent apart from the others, sketching or wandering in the mountains.

Camilla Fifteen-year-old Camilla gains new maturity through her relationship with her best friend’s brother and the growing realization that her parents are fallible individuals.

A Ring of Endless Light During the summer her grandfather is dying of leukemia and death seems all around, 15-year-old Vicky finds comfort with the pod of dolphins with which she has been doing research.

A Circle of Quiet Madeleine L’Engle’s personal place of retreat near a brook, a ten-minute walk from her family’s country home. This volume is a sharing of her inner life shaped primarily from materials in her journals.

Dare to be Creative Lecture presented by the author at the Library of Congress’ National Children’s Book Week. She discusses censorship, writing, love, and friendship.

Women’s History Month began as a week-long celebration in Sonoma, California in 1978 which was centered around International Women’s Day on March 8. A year later during a women’s history conference at Sarah Lawrence College, participants learned how successful the week was and decided to initiate similar events in their own areas. President Carter issued the first proclamation for a national Women’s History Week in 1980. In 1987, Congress (after being petitioned by the National Women’s History Project) passed Pub. L. 100-9 designating March as Women’s History Month. U.S. Presidents have issued proclamations on Women’s History Month since 1988.

The University of Central Florida community joins together to celebrate Women’s History Month across the multiple campuses with a wide variety of activities including workshops, film screenings, and WomanFest. Visit the Office of Diversity and Inclusion’s #neverthelessshepersisted page to learn more about the scheduled events, and stop by the library to view the display wall which includes bras decorated at our Honor, Remember & Support workshop.

Here at the UCF Libraries, we have created a list of suggested, and favorite, books about women in both history and fiction. Please click on the link below to see the full book list with descriptions and catalog links.

Featured Bookshelf: Women’s History Month

And don’t forget to peruse these and additional titles on the Featured Bookshelf display on the second (main) floor next to the bank of two elevators.

If you enjoyed watching Lady Bird, the film that broke the best Rotten Tomatoes record of all time last year, you’ll probably enjoying reading some of these books from our collection. Comical mother/daughter relationships abound and many of them have been made into popular movies as well. Happy reading! (Summaries plucked from Amazon.)

Joy Luck Club
The Joy Luck Club tells the story of four older Chinese-American women and their complex relationships with their American-born daughters. The story moves from China in the early twentieth century and San Francisco from the 1950s to the 1980s, as the eight women struggle to reach across a seemingly unpassable chasm of culture, generation and expectations to find strength and happiness.

Anywhere But Here
A national bestseller—adapted into a movie starring Natalie Portman and Susan Sarandon—Anywhere But Here is the heart-rending tale of a mother and daughter. A moving, often comic portrait of wise child Ann August and her mother, Adele, a larger-than-life American dreamer, the novel follows the two women as they travel through the landscape of their often conflicting ambitions.

Pride and Prejudice
In one of the most universally loved and admired English novels, a country squire of no great means must marry off his five vivacious daughters. Jane Austen’s art transformed this effervescent tale of rural romance into a witty, shrewdly observed satire of English country life.

Where’d you go, Bernadette?
Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she’s a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she’s a disgrace; to design mavens, she’s a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom. Then Bernadette disappears. To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence–creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter’s role in an absurd world.

Are you my Mother?
A woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel’s childhood . . . and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf.

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
A poignant, funny, outrageous, and wise novel about a lifetime friendship between four Southern women, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood brilliantly explores the bonds of female friendship, the often-rocky relationship between mothers and daughters, and the healing power of humor and love, in a story as fresh and uplifting as when it was first published a decade and a half ago.