Dr.2 Colleen Harris Collects Possibilities
A library is, by definition, a collection: books and broadsheets, databases and DVDs, graphic novels and games, student theses, local history, and the occasional object that refuses easy classification.
It seems fitting, then, that Meriam Library’s new dean, Colleen Harris, is a collector.
Harris, who began her role in early July, has accumulated an impressive collection of academic degrees: two bachelor’s degrees, four completed master’s degrees, another master’s degree in progress, and two doctoral degrees. Her studies have taken her from international relations and economics at Centre College to library science at the University of Kentucky; poetry at Spalding University; learning and leadership at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga; mythological studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute; nonprofit management at CSU San Bernardino; and, now, English at the University of Texas Permian Basin.
It is a remarkable course of study, but Harris does not present it as a ladder climbed so much as a curiosity pursued. Each degree offers another way of understanding how people make meaning: through stories, institutions, myths, art, public service, and the often messy realities of daily life.
That same spirit is visible upon introduction. Harris’ tattoos are their own collection, as are the books and images of tattoo art she enjoys. At home, she is also surrounded by crochet yarn, jigsaw puzzles, vividly colored walls, horror books and films, and an ever-changing selection of small-batch indie nail polish. She is, by her own account, a homebody with a penchant for Costco hot dogs.
Before coming to Chico, Harris served as dean of the Sue & Radcliffe Killam Library at Texas A&M International University in Laredo. Her move halfway across the country to Meriam Library is both a professional homecoming and a personal one. Harris spent nearly a decade as a librarian and library leader at CSU Channel Islands, sung back to California by a public-higher-education environment that aligns with her vision for academic libraries.
Her time in Texas also sharpened that vision. Across the country, changes in law and public policy have shaped what libraries and colleges are able to teach, collect, display, and discuss. For Harris, these shifts underscore the importance of academic libraries as spaces where students can encounter a broad range of ideas, pursue research freely, and develop the critical habits that make higher education meaningful.
Harris was raised on Long Island in a blue-collar neighborhood, but her education and career have carried her across disparate locales. She has worked as higher-education staff, faculty, librarian, and administrator. This experiential collection illuminates a leadership approach attentive to both institutional purpose and the people who make an institution run.
She is also an accomplished writer. Harris has published poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction widely, and her poetry collections and chapbooks include The Light Becomes Us, Toothache in the Bone, The Girl and the Gifts, These Terrible Sacraments, That Reckless Sound, Some Assembly Required, and God in My Throat: The Lilith Poems. Three additional poetry collections are forthcoming: The Discipline of Drowning, winner of the 2025 Broken Tribe Press Poetry Award; Babylon Songs; and Pain Scale: Poems of Chronic Illness.
Her creative work is the warp and weft of her life as a library leader. Both require close reading, intellectual generosity, and an openness to the stories people bring with them. Harris is also beginning work on a book about horror films for a university press -- a project suited to a person interested in the things that unsettle us, draw us together, and reveal what lies beneath the surface.
At Meriam Library, Harris joins a campus community already full of stories. The library’s collections hold the record of what has been learned, imagined, argued, and made. Its new dean brings a collection of her own, and, perhaps more importantly, a curiosity about the connections still waiting to be made possible.
Story by Ann Wilson, Meriam Library Communications