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Kim Williams-Odom
Kim Williams-Odom is manager of the St. Paul’s Branch library in the Charleston County, South Carolina, Public Library System. Her daily responsibilities include providing reference, readers’ advisory, and PC workstation assistance; supervising staff; preparing regular library reports; and preparing and presenting literature-based programs for all ages. Her daily goal is to be a customer-focused communicator who builds strong relationships with all library users.
Williams-Odom received a B.A. from North Carolina State University (1994). She earned her effective teacher training certificate from Wake Technical Community College (1997) and Coastal Carolina Community College (1995). Since 1999, she has completed numerous training sessions at the Charleston County Public Library/Technology Learning Center. Williams-Odom received her M.L.I.S. from the University of South Carolina, Columbia (2007), where she focused on early literacy. A mother of two girls (Imani, 9, and Nia, 5), Williams-Odom is interested in promoting early literacy as a matter of public health.
An advocate for better nutritional choices in schools and parental involvement through family literacy programming, Williams-Odom serves as a member of the Charleston Development Academy Charter School’s school improvement council, the Charleston County School District’s Title I Parent Leadership Institute/Advisory Council, the College of Charleston’s Center for Partnerships to Improve Education and the Charleston County Community of Readers.
Over the past four years, Williams-Odom and other librarians have collaborated with the REACH Charleston and Georgetown Diabetes Coalition, a CDC-funded community-campus program of partnered organizations, working to eliminate diabetes disparities for more than 12,000 African Americans in two coastal South Carolina counties. For their efforts with REACH 2010, they were honored with an award from the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science.
“Miss Kim,” as community members call her, promotes library services at health fairs and other community events; and contributes to planning, implementing and evaluating community programs to help the underserved get reliable health information they can understand and use. As a librarian, Williams-Odom hopes to make clinics, doctors’ offices and hospitals more empowering environments for parents.
Williams-Odom has served as the chair of the Library’s Cultural Diversity Task Force and was honored with the “Extra Mile Award” from the Charleston County Public Library. Recalling a quote from one of her favorite authors, Frederick Douglass, which can also be applied to health literacy, Williams-Odom’s motto is “once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
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