Between 1976 and 2002 Ginny Moore Kruse was director of the Cooperative Children's Book Center, a non-circulating children's and young adult literature library of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Throughout her 26 years at the CCBC Kruse enlarged the information and outreach functions of the CCBC in multiple ways, causing the CCBC to become increasingly visible and progressively more useful to undergraduate and graduate students, campus faculty and staff, and librarians, teachers, writers and others beyond the campus. In 1978 Kruse founded the CCBC Intellectual Freedom Information Services for Wisconsin teachers and librarians, a service later acknowledged by national awards. In 1985 the publication CCBC Choices first announced statistics about the representation of book creators of color in books published that year, annual information still widely quoted by the national media.
Kruse’s areas of specialization include book publishing trends, multicultural literature, books in translation, intellectual freedom, book evaluation, and Wisconsin authors and artists. Kruse provided weekly commentaries about children’s books on Wisconsin Public Radio beginning in 1976 and continuing for more than a decade; she made monthly morning appearances on WISC/TV for several years prior to her retirement. Over the years she became a sought-after speaker throughout Wisconsin, across the nation, and beyond, becoming involved in children’s literature events in Canada, England, Lithuania, Russia, Iran, South Africa, Bolivia and Peru.
Throughout her career Kruse served on and often chaired national book award juries: the John Newbery, Randolph Caldecott, Theodore Geisel, Mildred Batchelder, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Ezra Jack Keats, Coretta Scott King, Pura Belpé, NSK Neustadt, U.S. Hans Christian Andersen, and Jane Addams. She co-founded the CCBC Charlotte Zolotow Award and Lecture honoring a former University of Wisconsin student who became a noted author, publisher, and editor of books for children.
Kruse’s honors include election into Beta Phi Mu; Member of the Year, Society of Children's Book Writers; Librarian of the Year, Wisconsin Library Association; Alumna Honor, College of Education and Human Services, UW-Oshkosh; Christopher Latham Sholes Award, Council for Wisconsin Writers; Award for Outstanding Contributions to Children's Books, Children's Reading Round Table of Chicago; Award of Excellence, Wisconsin Educational Media Association; Alumna of the Year, School of Library and Information Studies, UW-Madison; Distinguished Service Award, Association for Library Services to Children, American Library Association; the Hope S. Dean Award, Foundation for Children's Books; and the Distinguished Achievement Award, School of Education.
After her formal retirement from UW-Madison, Kruse was awarded the second Rabin Youth Arts Award for Individual Achievement by the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra in 2003. She was named a Distinguished Alumna of the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh in 2006. In 2008 Kruse was named a Backyard Hero by Community Shares of Wisconsin for her leadership in the 2007 "Public Reading of Banned Books" event sponsored by the ACLU/Wisconsin. In 2011, Kruse was inducted into the Wisconsin Library Hall of Fame.
