After the massacre last week in Charleston, South Carolina, many are mourning the nine victims who have now been identified, including librarian Cynthia Hurd.

Hurd, 54, was the St. Andrews regional branch manager for the Charleston County Public Library system, where she worked for thirty-one years; the Charleston library system released a statement saying, “She touched the lives of thousands of people in the community—encouraging children during their earliest days as new readers and then watching them grow as they came to the library to work on homework assignments, then fill out college and job applications and, ultimately, return to the library with children of their own.” The library closed its sixteen branches last week to honor the victims.

In addition to her service as a librarian, Hurd was a member of the Charleston Housing Authority Board, and president of the Septima P. Clark Corp., a “nonprofit that gives small grants to resident programs for those in public housing,” according to The Post and Courier.

“I like helping people find answers,” Hurd said in a 2003 interview by the same newspaper. “Your whole reason for being there is to help people.”

Her survivors include her husband, Steve Hurd, and her siblings, including her brother, former North Carolina State Senator Malcolm Graham.

Related reading: The African American Intellectual History Society is gathering a list of readings for their “#Charlestonsyllabus,” which aims to “provide valuable information about the history of racial violence in this country and contextualize the history of race relations in South Carolina and the United States in general.”

In addition, Pacific Standard has released a piece by writer Morgan Jerkins that takes the lack of diversity within MFA programs to issue, and furthermore argues that Twitter provides a space for people of color unavailable in academia.