Tuscarawas County Public Library System

The Tuscarawas County Public Library System will use IllustrateHER: Empowering Girls through Visual Storytelling and Multimodal Reading as a system-wide initiative that will motivate girls in grades 3-12 to enhance their media literacy skills, further develop their emotional intelligence, and discover new ways to engage with literature while reading female-driven graphic novel titles. The project will fulfill these goals by (1) adding 25 graphic novel titles that are geared towards females or written by female graphic novelists to each of the library’s five locations; (2) promoting an art contest within local school districts that encourages young artists to create a female character that they’d most like to see represented in graphic novel fiction; and (3) hosting a culminating author program featuring either Meags Fitzgerald or Sarah Glidden, who will provide a workshop geared towards young women focused on graphic novel illustration.