Cecilia is a junior English major and psychology minor at WIU. She is a transfer student from Southeastern Community College in Keokuk, Iowa, currently residing in Carthage, Illinois. In her free time, she likes to write, sing, read, and play with her cats. Cecilia is also a writer for The Mirror & the Lamp.

M&L: What genre makes up most of your collection?

CG: I think young adult fantasy. I own a few series and trilogies, so I think that is why they add up more.

M&L: Which book is your favorite?

CG: I do not think I have a solid answer to this, as it cannot be limited to one book and it frequently changes. Maybe Atonement by Ian McEwan or Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

M&L: How long have you been building this collection?

CG: I have been building my book collection for about seven years.

M&L: Which book have you had the longest?

CG: Probably the copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I stole from my sister’s collection back in 2018.

M&L: Which book have you gotten most recently?

CG: Sharon Olds’ Satan Says. It was one of the required materials for a class, and I decided to keep it for my collection because I ended up really liking it.

M&L: Which is your favorite fiction book?

CG: Again, I have no real answer to this, so I apologize. I would like to mention Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, though, which is not one written to be reread, but looking at it on my bookshelf always makes me wish there was a way I could read it for the first time again.

M&L: Which is your favorite nonfiction book?

CG: Art Spiegelman’s Maus, for sure. Although, Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died and Mother to Son: A Collection of Essays and Readings in African American Studies, edited by Alphonso Simpson, Jr. are also on my top three nonfiction list.

M&L: Which is your favorite poetry book?

CG: This is a tie between Sylvia Plath’s The Collected Poems and Kelsey Bigelow’s Far From Broken. Both collections had a similar profound impact on my poetry and my overall view of life.

M&L: What makes your library/bookshelf unique to you?

CG: Maybe the seemingly nonsensical arrangement they are in and inconsistent color-coded annotations even I cannot decipher sometimes. The latter sometimes acts like a time capsule. When memory allows me to recall what each Post-it note color means, I am reminded of the moment I first lined up the adhesive part to that particular sentence or word, what I wished to highlight, and why I wanted to remember it. It brings back the thought processes of those particular moments of my life, which can be either mortifying or amusing, but I like remembering nonetheless.