Top: Filmmaker and photographer Lydia Douglas tears up the dance floor during the Cupid Shuffle at NHFPL Mardi Gras in 2023. Bottom: Cheryl Kershaw in Ives Squared. Lucy Gellman Photos.Lucy Gellman Photos.
Four days a week, Cheryl Kershaw makes a small pilgrimage from her home in West Haven to the main branch of the New Haven Free Public Library (NHFPL). Before she leaves the house, she packs a bag with everything she’ll need, from new paperwork to the scarf she’s currently knitting. Then she gets on a city bus, ready to spend her day amongst the stacks of books, or spread out at the tables in Ives Squared.
Kershaw, who grew up in libraries, is one of thousands of people who have already been through the branch’s doors this month, as the library enters 2026 as a vast repository of knowledge and all-ages social service hub. In preparation for its annual Mardi Gras fundraiser next month, it is launching “What the Library Means to Me”, a chance for New Haveners to share their NHFPL testimonies at each or any of the five branches or online.
The initiative, which is the literary brainchild of BLOOM owner and Arts Commissioner Alisha Crutchfield and Kulturally LIT Founder and fellow Arts Commissioner IfeMichelle Gardin, will culminate in a book of stories by and for the community, produced in hard copy and housed at the library’s branches. Crutchfield, who was the library’s first point of contact for Mardi Gras, said that she hopes to capture the sheer impact of the organization, which in 2024 alone served almost one million patrons across its five branches.
To participate, community members can send in their stories to charitablegiving@nhfpl.org, or share them on social media with the hashtag #NHFPLibraryStories. Gardin will also be collecting stories at each of the library’s five branches this month; more on that below. Tickets for Mardi Gras, which will celebrate chef and business owner Claire Criscuolo and city Cultural Affairs Director Sha McAllister on the evening of Feb. 17, are available here.
“The library is a sanctuary for so many people, including unhoused people and children,” said Gardin in a phone call last Thursday, outlining a series of “office hours” in which she will help patrons with story cultivation and collection. “So it’s very in alignment with Kulturally LIT and what we do.”
“The library has been a profound and multifaceted institution in my life,” Crutchfield added in a phone call Friday morning, crediting the organization with giving her the resources she needed to dream her small business, BLOOM, into being. “It has access to parenting education, programs that promote literacy, and it’s also an activity space,” with initiatives like the TinkerLab at the downtown branch.
Gardin at LIT Fest at the new Stetson Branch Library in 2023. Lucy Gellman File Photo.
This week, Gardin plans to hold her office hours at the Stetson Branch on Wednesday, Jan. 21, from 2:30 to 4:00 p.m.; the Fair Haven Branch on Thursday from 2:30 to 4:00 p.m.; the Mitchell Branch on Saturday from 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.; and the Ives Main Branch on Monday Jan. 2 from 3:00 to 5:30 p.m. Last Saturday, she kicked the project off at the Hill’s Courtland S. Wilson Branch, where stories from the Hill Parents Association grace the first floor of the building, nestled among the stacks.
For both Crutchfield and Gardin, it’s a project that feels as personal as it does professional. Gardin, who grew up in New Haven, found an early second home at the old Stetson Library, then located at Dixwell Avenue and Thompson Streets in a Carnegie-funded building that now houses Mount Hope Temple. At the time, “it was a gorgeous large room,” and Gardin would spend hours there after school and on the weekends, devouring both fiction and nonfiction. “I could read my way around the world or learn about how things came to be,” she remembered.
She was just 10 or 11 years old when the branch made the move to Dixwell Plaza, where it became a de facto community center and cherished third space until moving across the street in 2022. Gardin, who lived in the Florence Virtue Homes behind the plaza, loved making her way over to the library, a sanctuary even in rain or snow that would otherwise keep her pent up in the house. As she got older, it was where she learned about Black authors, laying the foundation for a lifelong love of literature that eventually led to LIT Fest.
“There was no particular formative experience,” she said. “It was a total library experience that was formative because books always took me places and gave me solace. They still do.”
Alisha Crutchfield (right) with her daughter, Sienna, at a press conference for Black Wall Street in August 2025. Lucy Gellman File Photo.
Crutchfield, meanwhile, has loved the library as a parent, a small business owner, and a newer arrival to the city. When she was a new mom caring for her young daughter, Sienna, the Mitchell Branch became a safe haven and community hub, with weekly “Stay N’ Play” storytime hours and kids activities that have since become so popular that there are two, usually both at capacity, on Tuesday mornings.
Ten years after she first moved to the city’s Westville neighborhood, she and Sienna still visit the library weekly, jumping around to different branches in what has become a mother-daughter ritual. So when she got a call asking if she would help reenvision Mardi Gras with event planner Andy Rubenoff this year, it was an easy yes. When, on a tour of Ives Squared, she saw just how many community members used the space across racial and socioeconomic lines, she doubled down on her goal “to seamlessly blend the [NHFPL’s] mission and magic.”
“Our libraries are beautiful,” she said, marvelling at the sheer amount of programming the NHFPL offers with less than one percent of the city’s budget. And she’s right: on a given day, any branch of the library may double as a storytime spot, warming and cooling center, workplace development site, makerspace, teen gaming space, continuing education classroom, and unexpected gallery. “They're well maintained. Their architecture is incredible. The library directors [branch managers] and librarians, they are beautiful human beings and they really make the experience a joyful time … it's a safe, sacred space.”
For patrons like Kershaw, a retired nurse who comes to the main branch four to five days a week, a project like “What the Library Means To Me” is a chance to speak to the impact of a beloved community institution. When she was a kid growing up in West Haven, Kershaw loved getting lost in books. Her dad, she remembered with a smile, insisted that the television made the house too hot in the summertime, convincing her and her siblings that reading was the more climate-friendly option. As a kid, she was a frequent visitor at the West Haven Public Library, of which there are currently two locations and a bookmobile.
By the time she was a student at Saint Mary’s High School, then located in New Haven, she had discovered the NHFPL’s main building on Elm Street, and would study for hours upstairs in the stacks. So when her local branch in West Haven (the Allingtown Library) closed recently, she knew exactly where to go. She praised Ives’ librarians and staff members for their seemingly endless patience, through which she has become more digitally fluent, plugged into new knitting and crafting opportunities, and reveled in sharing space with others.
“Everyone here is so helpful and knowledgeable," she said, adding that she enjoys watching people of all ages learn to use the TinkerLab, where they watch their wildest maker dreams take flight. “I love seeing the joy on their faces.”
Kristin Santamaria.
As she returned to her paperwork, that enthusiasm radiated to the reference desk, where Kristin Santamaria was checking out a copy of The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi before heading over to Breathing Room, where she is a yoga instructor. About once a month, she comes by the library to pick up a new book. More often, she comes through for printing and scanning. “It’s a safe third space,” she said without hesitation.
Growing up in Bristol, “the library seemed vast and big,” she remembered. When she was in college in Wilkinsburg, Penn., the library became a space where she and her friends could concentrate, gather, and explore together. She loves that New Haven has five library branches, each with its own personality. Crutchfield, too, praised the uniqueness of each branch, with focused collections that range from Spanish-language literature to Afghan women's leadership clubs to writing across the African diaspora.
It could not come at a more critical time for the organization, which has learned to do robust programming on just .78 percent of the city’s budget (for context, every other major city in Connecticut funds its library at over one percent of its overall general fund budget). In 2024, the NHFPL offered 2,700 programs, with a total of 42,000 participants. Between its physical and digital resources, it served 918,000 patrons. For Crutchfield and Gardin, who both sit on the city’s Arts Commission, those numbers are creative fuel as they work to bring the fundraiser to fruition.
“This is a call to any and everyone to support the library,” she said in Friday’s phone call, adding that she is already looking into ways to provide coffee, tea and pastries in the library’s now-vendor-less cafe space. “As a commissioner, as a business owner, as a New Havener, I am going to be an active voice in doing as much as I can to uplift the library and make sure that our libraries are funded.”
To participate, community members can send in their stories to charitablegiving@nhfpl.org, or share them on social media with the hashtag #NHFPLibraryStories.