Creating Award Winners in the Library: An Account of “Reprizing”

Literary awards—understood here as formal, collective, and public declarations of aesthetic excel-lence—have been criticized for perpetuating structural inequities that harm oppressed authors and readers. However, the library as an institution continues to participate in prizing through a system of interlocking norms and conventional practices that we term “library reprizing.” We track reprizing through its various manifestations in collection development, classification, and readers’ advisory service. We posit that reprizing is not merely a way of informing patrons of award winners but is part of a coordinated response that aids materially in the creation of award winners. Given that prizing sustains dominant structures of power in print culture, we suggest that one route to reform may lie in librarians’ capacity to be strategically uncooperative regarding awards. We provide a map for proposing concrete strategies as part of a larger ameliorative project to reform literary prizing from within the library.