Kirstie Wilson

Kirstie supports the arts by leading on the library service’s delivery of the Libraries Connected cultural offer in the context of our Council priorities. She embeds the promotion and use of broader creative activity as a way into reading and literature throughout her work. All our librarians are Arts Award advisers and opportunities for children to achieve the award are incorporated into our events planning.

Kirstie leads on the provision of a range of high quality cultural and creative experiences, both as a universal offer and targeted to meet specific needs within the local community. Many of these are in partnership with Council colleagues and local organisations. As an active member of the multiagency Nurturing Parents programme, she advocates to health and early years colleagues on benefits of family involvement in reading and the arts from the earliest opportunity, including our Storywalks programme:

She commissions local artists to increase the range of creative and cultural opportunities available, mentoring young artists to help them develop skills to run their own businesses. By being an active member of the local cultural educational partnership, working with arts organisations and individual artists she achieves projects such as Metal Metropolis, a book written by local children with Chol Theatre.

On the steering group of Huddersfield Literature Festival, she supports the annual celebration of books and authors, poetry and performance; works with Creative Scene to build arts participation in and around the five towns in North Kirklees as well as many other local arts organisations and festivals. Recent work includes developing an offer with colleagues regionally and The Reading Agency to bring more high profile authors to the region; championing the Read Regional campaign to celebrate new books from the North of England.

She has utilised the British Library’s Living Knowledge network to create a stronger adult offer through developing the live screening project as well as bringing Get it Loud in Libraries here – our first gig sold out! She initiated our annual Pageturners Children’s Reading Festival, offering creative activities to engage and inspire the reading and artistic choices of primary age children; most recently piloting an at home offer where artists created versions of their workshops which could be delivered by van, film or social media to children and families who had barriers stopping them from attending live events, such as young carers.

She devised Being All I Can Be, workshops with performance poets to engage secondary school age young people to use the Shelf Help collection, using drama, creative writing and rap to foster acceptance and empathy. A council priority being Early Intervention and Prevention, she inspired the project, ‘Well into Words’ which uses  a multisensory approach to storytelling, making the classics accessible to diverse groups including people with learning disabilities, visual impairments and those living with dementia. This approach opens up literature to many who would find a traditional book format challenging or impossible. This way of working is embedded in service delivery through library staff training and mentoring.