Dr. Mickey Blackwell has been a member of the Kanawha County Library Board since March of 2016. He lives in Charleston and is from Elkview, WV. He serves as Assistant Chair for the KCPL Membership Committee and is a member of the KCPL Public Services Committee.
Dr. Blackwell is a tenure-track Professor of Education at West Virginia State University, and is the Executive Director of the WV Association of Elementary and Middle School Principals. He also serves as a member of the Elk Valley Library Advisory Board.
He has more than twenty-five years in public education serving as an English teacher, school principal and county superintendent. He is strong supporter of libraries and literacy, and his school, Horace Mann Middle School, was always the circulation leader in secondary school libraries in Kanawha County.
Dr. Blackwell has held a KCPL library card since childhood, and in elementary school he often borrowed books from the Bookmobile at its stop in Elkview. Now, he enjoys borrowing music CDs and graphic novels from the KCPL system. He has additional library cards from the Library of Congress and the New York City Public Library system, and has served as a volunteer for Poetry Out Loud competitions for the past four years.
In 2018 and 2019, Dr. Blackwell created, coordinated and implemented the statewide literacy event “Let’s Read West Virginia”—a one day reading activity that was partnered with more than 1200 educational, governmental and arts-based groups throughout the state, including the WV Library Commission. He also serves as the Vice-Chair for the WV Commission on the Arts and as an Executive Board Member for the WV Children’s Advocacy Network.