Wayne A. Wiegand is F. William Summers Emeritus Professor of Library and Information Studies at Florida State University. He has also taught at the University of Kentucky (1976-1986) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1987-2002). At Florida State University, in 2006, he organized and, for seven years, directed the Florida Book Awards, currently the nation's largest state book awards program. He is often referred to as the dean of American library historians. In addition to more than seventy-five scholarly articles, he has authored numerous books, including An Active Instrument for Propaganda: The American Public Library During World War I (1989), Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey (1996), Part of Our Lives: A Peoples History of the American Public Library (2015), American Public School Librarianship: A History (2021), and with his wife, Shirley A. Wiegand, Books on Trial: Red Scare in the Heartland (2008) and The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South: Civil Rights and Local Activism (2018). His current project is In Silence or Indifference: Librarianship's Willful Blindness Towards Jim Crow Segregated Public School Libraries, 1954-1974. He currently lives in Walnut Creek, California.
