Communities Thrive@ Your Library during National Library Week! Libraries celebrate April 11 through April 17, 2010. It's a time to celebrate the contributions of Libraries in communities nationwide. First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance in April sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and Libraries across the country.

It is especially exciting this year at Andover Public Library because we have earned FIVE stars in the Library Journal Index of Library services. This is a nationwide honor, and we are proud of our Andover readers for making us one of the top libraries in the US. We are also hugely proud of the PV Multimedia students who won first place at the regional College Tech Prep Showcase Competition March 16th for their presentation about Libraries. They especially focused on Andover Library services. We wish them luck in their further competitions. We also heartily congratulate Pymatuning Middle and Primary Schools for accomplishing their Million Pages Reading Challenge this year. We are so proud of all our readers!

Andover Public Library, in celebration of National Library Week, is planning a fun week of daily book drawings for all patrons. We also have a special Garden Prize. Also, a bonus for all Library patrons: overdue library materials returned during National Library Week will be FINE FREE!

The public is invited to the Library for a reception for author Laura Pedersen on Wednesday, April 14 at 4pm, at which she will do a reading from one of her books. She recently donated four of her novels to the Library: Beginner's Luck, Last Call, Heart's Desire, and The Big Shuffle.  Her first novel, Going Away Party, won the Three Oaks Prize for fiction and was published by Ballentine Books.

Laura Pedersen was born in Buffalo, NY and moved to Manhattan in 1983 where she began working on The American Stock Exchange. She chronicled these years in her first book, Play Money. Laura teaches reading and trades Yu-Gi-Oh cards at the Booker T. Washington Learning Center in East Harlem, and is a member of the National Literary Association P.E.N. (Poets, essayists and novelists). For more information go to

Laura's latest book is Buffalo Unbound:

BUFFALO UNBOUND
September 18, 2010

When Forbes magazine recently ranked Buffalo, New York, eighth on a list of America's 10 Most Miserable Cities, former New York Times columnist Laura Pedersen set out to celebrate the people and places that make Buffalo the Most Exciting City.  In Buffalo Unbound, a follow-up to the award-winning Buffalo Gal, Pedersen captures the current renaissance in a humorous conversational style that would make former Nickel City newspaperman Mark Twain proud.

Click here to read an excerpt.