Posted by The Bay Area Young Adult Librarian (BAYA) group and California Library Association’s Young Services Interest Group (CLA YSIG) are proud to announce the winner of the 2025 California Library Association, Young Adult Services Award: Jessica Lundin.
Jessica Lundin has worked with youth since serving as a camp counselor in high school. She worked as a middle school teacher after graduating from Mills College with a BA in Biology. Making a career switch, she got a Master’s in Library and Information Science from San José State’s iSchool in 2013.
In 2016, she began working at the San José Public Library’s Dr. Roberto Cruz Alum Rock Branch, where she worked with teens and adults. In 2022, Jessica transferred to the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Main to work at Youth Services, specifically as a Teen Librarian at TeenHQ.
After starting at TeenHQ, Jessica coordinated a teen entrepreneur program in partnership with the WeThrive organization, which provided curriculum and seed funding to help teens learn about and start their own small businesses. The program evolved following sessions in 2023 and 2024 and partially merged with the California State Library grant-funded program after it ended, ARTrepreneurs, which was also hosted at TeenHQ and focused on craft and creative entrepreneurship. Since 2025, Jessica has updated and redesigned the curriculum and is running her own version of WeThrive, now called ARTrepreneurs (2.0), where the library provides seed funding, and teens are invited to sell at multiple pop-up markets and craft fairs organized by Jessica.
Since the program began in 2023 and as of October 2025, 39 teens have completed it, forming 29 businesses. Over the course of four sessions, teens have received over $1,800 in seed funding and generated over $2,850 in income. At least 12 businesses have taken the opportunity to come back after the program to sell at other Craft Fairs made available by the library. One of the top earners has sold at three fairs so far, generating nearly $500 in income, and hopes to be able to buy herself a new cellphone by the end of 2025 with her small business profits.
In addition to this flagship program, Jessica Lundin has been a Team Lead for the Graphic Novel Making Contest for the past 6 years, runs monthly TeenHQ MakerSpace programs, helps manage the TeenHQ YA Collection, and selects YA Nonfiction and YA Graphic Novels for the system. As part of her professional development, Jessica is a proud member of Bay Area Young Adult Librarians and has acted as the Secretary for the past three years. She is now the Chief Financial Officer of BAYA.
When Jessica isn’t constantly thinking about work, she paints ceramic and watercolor pieces, does cross-stitch, and cosplays with her partner in mischief and mayhem, her husband.
Bay Area Young Adult Librarians 