“The Librarian of Rikers” Cartoons, Books, and Narratives

Please join us for a discussion with Medar de la Cruz and Thai Jones. Thai and Medar will discuss their experiences working in libraries. Thai’s familiarity with academia and Medar’s involvement providing book cart services at Rikers Island will highlight the consequences of the justice system in the context of information accessibility. This talk will open up a larger conversation on how to bridge the gap from university archives to public resources.

About the speakers

is a Dominican-American cartoonist and illustrator born in Miami, Florida, and currently residing in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated with a degree in illustration from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and has worked as a freelance illustrator for The New York Times and The New Yorker. Medar has recently been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for a comic he illustrated and wrote, published in The New Yorker about his experience working for the Outreach Department at the Brooklyn Public Library, where he provided book cart services at Rikers Island.

is the Curator for History at Columbia University's archive. He teaches critical research methods and the history of radicalism and is the author of several books, including More Powerful Than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York’s Year of Anarchy (Bloomsbury, 2014) and A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family’s Century of Conscience (Free Press, 2004). He served as historical consultant and co-writer on the award-winning podcast Mother Country Radicals (2022). His writing has appeared in a variety of national U.S. publications, including The New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New York Times, The Nation, and the Occupied Wall Street Journal.

Host or Publisher The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities