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Eligibility, nomination steps, recent winners, and how MLIS grads can build a case
The Virginia Library Association's Up and Comer Award recognizes librarians in the early years of their careers, usually those within a short window of finishing an MLS or one of many MLIS programs and working in a Virginia library. Unlike a long-service award, it rewards what someone has built, not how long they have worked.
That distinction matters because the award can be the first formal marker of a professional track record. One of the two 2026 recipients reached it through academic work-study, a small public library job, and an MLIS online, not a straight full-time route.
For new librarians, the practical question is how documented community impact, more than tenure, now decides who qualifies for recognition like this.
The Virginia Library Association (VLA), one of the state's library professional organizations, sets aside a dedicated professional honor for new library workers: the Up and Comer Award. Within the wider VLA awards program, it is not a scholarship or a long-service trophy. It is an early-career recognition that spotlights someone already showing leadership, creativity, and service promise in Virginia libraries.
For a recent MLIS graduate, this changes the timeline. Many association awards favor decades of accomplishment, which can feel out of reach before your first professional role. An up-and-comer award instead asks: who is already moving the field forward? That gives new librarians a realistic target in the first few years after graduation.
For early-career librarians in public, academic, school, or special libraries, the award provides an accessible first step into professional recognition without waiting for a long legacy. That recognition normalizes early achievement as a legitimate career signal in Virginia's library community and beyond.
The tricky part of eligibility is that the award is built around a short career window, but the published wording is not perfectly tight. Here is what the Virginia Library Association's awards pages (vla.org) say, and where you should ask before you nominate.
The listed prerequisite is an MLS. The published criteria do not say whether an MLIS counts as an equivalent, and they do not say whether the degree must be finished by nomination time. Most accredited programs now grant the MLIS, so the MLS vs MLIS gap matters to current students. Treat an MLIS as likely acceptable, but not confirmed, and get an answer in writing.
The eligibility criterion reads that the nominee is "employed as a librarian for five (5) years or fewer." Elsewhere VLA describes nominees as having "less than five years" of experience. Those two phrasings differ at exactly five years, so a nominee at the boundary should check.
The nominee must work in a Virginia library, a requirement covered in How to Become a Librarian in Virginia, and the posted criteria allow full-time or part-time employment. Experience gained in other states is not addressed. Neither is the question of whether the clock starts at your degree or at your first library job.
The 2026 awards recognize contributions made during 2025. Nominations were due May 31, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. Because the window has closed for this cycle, use the time to confirm the open questions above with the VLA awards committee before the next call.
Can you nominate yourself for the VLA Up and Comer Award? Yes. The award criteria expressly allow self-nomination, so an early-career librarian does not have to wait for a colleague to speak up.
The Virginia Library Association runs nominations for all of its awards through one annual call, not a separate Up and Comer application.
For the 2026 cycle, the deadline was May 31, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. The form and every supporting document had to be in before that time. That cycle has closed, and its winners are due to be honored at the VLA Annual Conference in Norfolk in October 2026. Dates change annually, so check the next call rather than assuming a late-spring deadline. The 2026 awards recognize work done during 2025, which means the work you document this year is what a future call will evaluate.
The 2026 call requires "accompanying documentation," but the published materials do not give a checklist for the Up and Comer Award. They also give no page or word limits. A nomination letter, a résumé, and letters of support are common in association award packets, but confirm what the form actually asks for before you assume any of them. The award page lists four review criteria: leadership potential, innovation and creativity, engagement, and impact. Those four criteria are your best guide to what the packet should show.
The award page also says one winner will come from public libraries and one from academic libraries, while still carrying older wording that only one person may receive the award each year. If the category matters to your plans, check the current page.
Build the packet around the four criteria. For each one, pick a single project and attach a concrete result, such as attendance, a new partnership, or a service that is still running. Specific outcomes persuade a committee more than a list of duties.
A detailed scoring rubric would make this award easy to prepare for, but VLA publishes something simpler: four named criteria and a nomination packet. No weighting, ranking formula, interview stage, or minimum score is stated. Treat the four criteria as equal and build evidence for each.
The VLA Awards and Recognition Committee reviews nominations and selects the winner. It is chaired by Rachel Kopchick of Virginia Beach Public Library. Nominators submit the nominee's contributions to the field, their own evaluation of why the work merits consideration, and letters of support. No VLA membership is required, though older nomination forms asked for approximate years of membership as background information only.
Through 2024 the Up and Comer Award went to one person per year, and every confirmed recipient worked in a Virginia public library. VLA's awards page, updated in April 2026, now says there will be one winner from public libraries and one from academic libraries, although the same page still carries the older line limiting the award to one person per year, so treat VLA's official awards and winners pages as the authoritative record. We could not confirm the 2025 and 2026 recipients from a VLA winners announcement, and while an October 2026 local news report names Emma Daugherty of Suffolk Public Library as an Up and Comer winner, we have not matched that report to an official VLA announcement, so those rows are marked unconfirmed rather than filled in.
| Year | Recipient | Affiliation | Library Type / Category |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | Babak Zarin | Central Rappahannock Regional Library | Public library |
| 2022 | Olivia Hasan | Hampton Public Library | Public library |
| 2023 | Rebecca Weimert | Poquoson Public Library | Public library |
| 2024 | Amanda Henderson | Suffolk Public Library | Public library |
| 2025 | Unconfirmed | Unconfirmed | Single award (format before the April 2026 update) |
| 2026 | Unconfirmed | Unconfirmed | Public libraries category |
| 2026 | Unconfirmed | Unconfirmed | Academic libraries category |
Early-career recognition can go to a digital humanities builder in a university library or an outreach leader in a city library, and the Virginia Library Association honors both. The VLA announcements show what the work behind each award looked like.
Hogan received the VLA Academic Up and Comer Award. The recognition cited her for building a digital humanities program, one of the library science innovations that expanded research support for faculty and students. She is the Instruction and Research Librarian for the Arts and Digital Humanities at William & Mary Libraries, a role she has held since 2023. Her duties include reference, information-literacy instruction, research support, and campus-wide digital humanities projects. She is also the Digital Humanities Project Lead for the Black Women's Diaries Project, which is scheduled to launch in November 2026.1 The announcement describes her program generally and does not name a single publication as the basis for the award.
Henderson, of Suffolk Public Library, won the Up and Comer Award for outreach leadership. VLA highlighted her commitment to addressing food insecurity and improving community outreach. It also cited her community-service initiatives and needs-based programming. According to the announcement, she became a regional leader in outreach services and reshaped Suffolk's Community Engagement Department by shifting resources toward foundational community needs. No single project title is given as the formal work cited.
The VLA's award records identify Babak Zarin as the 2021 Up and Comer Award winner. They list Zarin, of Central Rappahannock Regional Library, as a George Mason Award recipient in the 2022 awards listing. The same listing names Olivia Hasan of Hampton Public Library as the 2022 Up and Comer recipient, though it gives no detail about her work. Check VLA's own awards page for the full year-by-year record before citing either name.
Hogan and Henderson were both recognized for building something that outlasted a single event: a program in Hogan's case, a department's direction in Henderson's. Each created a service that reached people the library was not yet serving well, and each did it inside a specific institution. For MLIS students, that is a more useful benchmark for MLIS career paths than any single title or publication.
One of the two most recent Up and Comer winners, Emma (Shinn) Daugherty, did not take a straight line into a specialized role. The details below come from a WV News report published in October 2026.
Daugherty, a 2012 graduate of Ripley High School in West Virginia, got her first library job through a college work-study program at the T.W. Phillips Memorial Library at Bethany College. After earning her bachelor's degree, she moved into public libraries at the Jackson County Public Library in Ripley. At the Ripley branch her work covered the front desk, genealogy research, program planning, and item cataloging and repair. That is a broad, hands-on mix that many paraprofessionals will recognize.
She then earned her MLIS through an online MLIS program at Kent State University. While studying, she worked at The Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County in Ohio, balancing MLIS and a part-time job. She later worked at Norfolk Public Library in Virginia and now serves at Suffolk Public Library in Suffolk, Virginia.
At Suffolk, Daugherty is the Community Engagement (outreach) Librarian. Her focus is justice services and community partnerships. This is a job built around people who may never walk into a branch on their own, and around the agencies that already serve them.
In Hampton Roads, libraries are departments of their city government rather than separate private entities. That structure shapes the work. A librarian sits inside the same system as other municipal offices, which can make interagency partnerships a natural part of the job rather than an outside favor. For students weighing where to work, the governance model of a library is worth asking about.
Outreach and justice services deserve more room in MLIS curricula and practicum options than they usually get. Most coursework still centers on cataloging, reference, and youth services. Few programs prepare students to build partnerships, serve justice-involved patrons, or work across agency lines , core elements of a prison librarian career. Daugherty's route suggests that the skills come from varied early experience plus a graduate degree that can be applied flexibly. Students who want this path should look for practicums in public library outreach, and programs should consider offering them.
Emma (Shinn) Daugherty's route to the Virginia Library Association Up and Comer Award did not follow a traditional full-time, MLIS-first track. She built library experience in academic and small public library roles, earned her MLIS online while working, and moved into city library systems in Virginia before taking a specialized outreach position.
Early-career awards increasingly reward documented community impact rather than years on the job, which shifts the work of qualifying for one into the degree years themselves. The winner patterns described earlier point the same direction: recognition tends to follow librarians who built a visible track record in paid or practicum roles before and during their MLIS, not those who waited until after graduation to start.
A job description says "planned programs." A nomination says "launched a monthly reentry resource session with the sheriff's office and a regional workforce board, serving roughly 120 participants in its first year." Translate routine duties into people served, new partners secured, programs created, collections built, or processes changed. Numbers do not have to be large; they have to be real and attributable to you.
Tell a supervisor or mentor, well before any deadline, that you would like to be considered for a state association early-career award in a future cycle. That conversation does two things: it signals ambition, and it gives the person who would write your nomination a reason to start noticing and recording your work now, while it is still fresh.
Keep a running record of what your work changed: program attendance, partnerships built, people served. Award committees can only reward the impact they can see documented.
A state association honor and a national one measure different things. The VLA Up and Comer Award evaluates work done inside Virginia, judged by Virginia colleagues, usually with state membership or in-state employment attached. National recognition widens the field to every library worker in the country and, in most cases, drops the early-career framing entirely.
State awards tend to be narrower on purpose. They typically ask that the nominee work in that state, that the nominator belong to the association, or that the candidate fall within a defined early-career window. The Pennsylvania Library Association Awards, for example, require that nominators be association members, a structural pattern common across state groups. That narrowness is an advantage for someone two or three years out of an MLIS degree: the applicant pool is smaller and the reviewers already understand the regional context of your work.
Winning in Virginia does not advance you toward an ALA honor, and nobody should pitch it that way. What a state award does give you is a documented, third-party validated record: a program with measurable outcomes, a committee that vetted it, and language you can reuse in a future nomination packet. Emerging Leaders overlaps most closely in audience, since both speak to people under the five-year mark. Build the evidence first; the venue can come later.
