Skip to main content

MCC Daily Tribune Archive

President Kress Shares her Inspiring Book


The MCC Library and Academic Services are hosting a faculty and staff book drive gathering on April 30, 2014 from 8:30 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. in the North Atrium. Please join us for coffee where faculty and staff will be encouraged to donate books and share a message on an Inspiring Every Day Bookmark that describes how the book inspired them. This message, along with the book, will be passed on to the new owner. This event will support donating books to K-12 students in the Rochester City School District on behalf of the Rochester Education Foundation. Monetary donations will be accepted at the event.

President Kress shares the book that inspired her as a child:

When I was pregnant with my daughter, one of the first books I bought was one of my own childhood favorites: "
The Snowy Day" by Ezra Jack Keats. It may seem an odd book to buy for a child born in Florida, but anyone familiar with Keats’s book will understand. In writing this recollection, I can see myself taking The Snowy Day from the low shelves by the windows in my Wisconsin grade school classroom and pouring over the bright pages as I sat on the floor in the reading corner. 

An artistically-minded little girl armed with construction paper, old wallpaper samples, safely blunted scissors, and edible paste -- I imagined making a book just like this one. I knew winter: spending solitary hours in the snow, making crunching tracks and exquisite angels; going into battle with my friends in forts stocked with an armory of snowballs; warming my hands and feet by the grates so I could run right back outside. I so identified with the small red snow-suited figure tracing tracks in the snow that it wasn’t until years later I fully realized this figure was a he (Peter) and he was African-American. All along, I thought of him as me: exploring a snowy world that turned everything from high hills to flat parking lots into a wonderland. 

"The Snowy Day" shaped my view of the world as a place of wonder, independence, exploration, and bright, colorful, crisp beauty. A world where all children have the freedom to imagine, create, and play—and all children always come back to warm, welcoming homes.  What’s more inspiring than that?

What book inspired you as a child? Bring it to the book drive gathering!

Kimberley Collins, Kristen Love, Mark McBride, Shirley Provost
Academic Services, MCC Library, Office of Student Life and Leadership Development
04/23/2014