Marie-Elena Ortiz began work here this week
Thank goodness for a very good friend of Marie-Elena Ortiz.
But first, who is Marie-Elena Ortiz?
She’s the new director of the Highland Falls Library, starting her job this week. She’s a native of Brooklyn, attended Brooklyn College (BFA in creative writing) and Stony Brook University (grad school, studying Dramaturgy!), and she’s worked as a librarian assistant at Rose Memorial Library in Stony Point for the last eight years.
Other points about herself she’s happy with the community knowing: she reads “a lot”, she has a dog named Shiloh (named after the Newbery Medal-winning children’s novel by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor), she loves the theater, and she lives in Stony Point.
Back to her friend — if it weren’t for that best friend encouraging Ortiz to apply for the job at the Highland Falls Library, she wouldn’t be starting work this week.
“She kept calling me and texting me and even Facebook messaging me reminding me to get my resume together and to apply,” she laughs. “I couldn’t escape her!”
Ortiz is very much looking forward to her new job, and to getting to know the Highland Falls and Fort Montgomery community residents.
“I believe you can get to know a person within five minutes, just by the books they check out from the library.”
Marie-Elena Ortiz
She arrives at a point when the library is just beginning the process of reopening, post COVID-19 shutdowns. She’ll work with the existing library staff — “I can’t wait to learn from my new colleagues” — to get the doors reopened and let library patrons back into the building.
Ortiz, speaking from the downstairs Phipps room in the library last week, said she has had a “love for libraries for so long” and thinks she may have arrived in the place she was meant to be. As she walked around the downstairs of the building, she was drawn to the children’s rooms, noting that as a child, she loved the fact that books could take her wherever she wanted to go.
She grew up in Brooklyn, and has also spent time working in the Brooklyn Public Library. She participated there in a ‘Book Buddy’ program with young teens and said she very much enjoyed getting to know them and to provide them with a safe place to spend time.
“I believe you can get to know a person within five minutes, just by the books they check out from the library,” she laughed, noting that some of the children she worked with came in bearing great weight, but left with books that she knew would help them escape from whatever they were dealing with.
Helping people find books, encouraging children to explore the library, continuing “really good” programs (“I love that they’ve been doing story-time online,” she said), and spending all day in a lovely library sounds delightful, but Ortiz knows there is much more to her new job than that.
She says she knows there will be a bit of a learning curve for her in some library operations, but she has significant knowledge of the RCLS system (Highland Falls is a member library of the Ramapo Catskill Library System, as was Rose Library), and, again, “colleagues who have been running this place for awhile”.
“This is a great opportunity for me to grow,” she said. “I’m nervous, but it’s a good kind of nervous.”
She added that she doesn’t expect to make any changes to the library as the community knows it, and really is most looking forward to meeting library patrons.
“I love people, and I love keeping busy,” she said. “It sounds like I have a lot of both in the very near future!”
