Katrina Stokes, the new director of the East Baton Rouge Library, picked Portobello’s Grill on Old Hammond Highway for her Baton Rouge Classic lunch.
For lunch, Portobello Grill started us off with complimentary bread, served with an olive oil dipping sauce — highly recommend. She ordered chicken marsala and I ordered chicken piccata. The sizable portions arrived quickly.
Stokes moved to Baton Rouge from Vicksburg, Mississippi, earlier this year to take the helm of the parish’s library system with a staff of more than 500 in 15 locations, including the main library and the outreach center.
She’s already visited all the libraries but is looking forward to getting to know the communities better.
Libraries and books have been the great theme of her life, but she also loves monsters and metal music.
Stokes and I quickly discovered that our fathers grew up in the same part of rural Mississippi, the same county, in fact. Her father joined the military and after a childhood in Germany, she and her family moved to a number of military posts including Kansas, Georgia and South Korea before eventually coming back to Mississippi, where she attended Mississippi State University, my alma mater.
She said her friends describe her as having a never-say-die attitude.
“I don’t back down from challenges easily. I fully intend to meet whatever challenges come my way because I want this library to flourish,” Stokes said. “I mean it was flourishing already before I came along — and that’s, that’s largely in credit to the people who are already working there.”
One aspect of the library she hopes more in the community will come and visit is the special collections at the main branch on Goodwood.
“It’s an impressive collection of artifacts and artwork, as well as old archives, particularly for someone who might be wanting to study history or genealogy,” she said. “It has that weight of history too behind all of it.”
Stokes said that she sees evidence all around of the ways libraries are valued in East Baton Rouge Parish, regardless of which branch you visit, whether in more rural, urban, affluent or not-so affluent areas.
Visiting the various branches has confirmed for her that each community is unique in some way.
“Our staff is working very hard to meet the needs of all of them,” she said. “The first thing I usually ask as I meet the branch managers for the first time is, ‘Tell me about your community.'”
Stokes and I also shared a childhood love of reading.
“When I was a child back in elementary school, a lot of the books I checked out were nonfiction — starting with things like movie monsters. I was fascinated with old movies,” she said. “I loved Christopher Lee and Bela Lugosi. I read a lot of stuff on the supernatural, much to my mother’s dismay, but I also read a lot about the Founding Fathers of the United States and the Revolutionary War.”
Stokes says she was fascinated with the American Revolution but then moved on to Nancy Drew.
She read the entire series from before moving on to Greek mythology.
“I can name off every one of the Greek gods and goddesses and the heroes,” she said with a smile. “I was very good at answering that one in Jeopardy. My parents were absolutely amazed every time.”
From there, she moved to science fiction and fantasy, starting with the Dragonriders of Pern series by American-Irish author Anne McCaffrey. In high school, she read the Dune series and is a fan of the Dune movies.
“I also loved fairy tales as a child,” she said. “A lot of authors out there who will do a retelling of fairy tales — more for adults.”
About this time in the lunch, our waiter brought us a giant plate of cotton candy, which was a delightful surprise.
As we sampled the cotton candy, Stokes picked right back up chatting about the retelling of fairy tales.
She said she’s finding the adjustment to life in Baton Rouge an easy one because she’s finding so many fun things to do — like the Silent Book Club at Pelican to Mars.
When I asked why she believes that the Silent Book Club trend is catching on, she had a thoughtful answer.
“The old way of book clubs with everybody being supposed to choose the same book and read it and then talk about it — that’s well and good, but it feels too much like a classroom,” she said. “On the one hand, it’s good because it might introduce you to a work that you normally might not have read — that has happened before for me when I wound up loving the book after all.”
By the same token, we agreed that sometimes the opposite is true — and the books decided upon by a book club are not to one’s liking.
Stokes is not a fan of reading books that are a torture to finish.
“Don’t torture yourself trying to finish it. Just walk away. Life is too short,” she said.
She explained that in a silent book club, people gather and read together in silence for an hour, then having the option to talk about what they’re reading during the second hour.
In short, people get to read what they want and still have the chance to talk about it with others.
“You’re sharing your own perspective and that might actually interest somebody else who might normally have passed on the book into considering,” she said. “I’m just a bigger fan of choosing the one that you want and then talk about it. Tell us, you know, what is it about the book that, you know, that draws you in? What keeps you interested? What’s the pace of the story like? Are the characters interesting?”
Reading isn’t the only thing Stokes is doing in Baton Rouge. She also tried an after-dark egg hunt that BREC organized and another event called Cupid is Stupid that the Queen Baton Rouge put on for Valentine’s Day, adding that it was hilarious.
She’s taken her children to the zoo. She’s a fan of the zoo and can’t wait until its construction phase is done.
She’s also a fan of Mid City Beer Garden.
“I like the fact that they allow you to bring your dogs in even though I don’t have a dog,” she said. “I’m happy to see other people’s dogs. Somebody asked me, ‘What was your highlight of your day the other day?’ I said, ‘I got to pet a dog.’ That made me very happy.”