Erin Hollingsworth
District Librarian North Slope Borough School District
Erin Hollingsworth has been a librarian in the American Arctic since 2011. She currently works as the District Librarian for the North Slope Borough School District; her position requires her to visit all eight remote communities on Alaska’s North Slope. Prior to that, she worked as the Public Services Librarian at Tuzzy Consortium Library at Iḷisaġvik College, in Utqiaġvik, Alaska. Erin has experience working in academic, public, K-12 school, special, and tribal library settings in Alaska, Montana, and British Columbia, Canada.
Hollingsworth holds a MLIS, with a First Nations Concentration, from the University of British Columbia and a M.Ed. from the University of Montana. While employed at Iḷisaġvik College, she earned her AA in Iñupiaq Studies, as well as several Iñupiaq language and fine arts certificates. She is currently working on a PhD in Indigenous Studies at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where her research interests include cross-cultural communications and human safety in the Arctic. In 2023, Hollingsworth received her Arctic Securities graduate certificate from the Department of Security and Emergency Management at UAF.
When not flying between Arctic villages or working in the library, Hollingsworth can be found volunteering in a community. She currently serves on the KBRW public radio Board of Directors, the Arctic Women in Crisis (AWIC) Advisory Board, and the Board of Directors for Friends of Tuzzy Library. She is a previous president of the Alaska Library Association (AkLA) and the current chair of the Alaska Native Issues Roundtable. Hollingsworth is also engaged in the advocacy and intellectual freedom work AkLA does around the state.