Spark a Change in your community
Spark a Change is a systemwide initiative that invites all residents to spark curiosity and inspire change in ourselves and our communities.
Each year, Pioneer Library System identifies a critical topic in our community and selects title(s) that address that topic.
PLS is thrilled to sponsor Lara Love Hardin, a 2024 Oprah Book Club pick and a New York Times bestselling author, as the 2026 Spark a Change keynote speaker. Join the conversation as part of PLS’s Spark a Change series.
How to Participate
Read the Book
Instantly borrow The Many Lives of Mama Love through Overdrive and experience a deeply personal story of survival, transformation, and second chances.
Discover Resources
Explore the 2026 Children of Incarcerated Parents Toolkit and learn about resources, services, and support available for children, families, caregivers, and community members.
Attend an Event
Join author talks, book discussions, community conversations, and resource fairs that connect the themes of the book to real-life experiences and opportunities for learning.
Why This Matters
Stories like The Many Lives of Mama Love create space for conversations about resilience, recovery, identity, and second chances.
Nearly 1 in 9 children experience parental incarceration during childhood.
Between 25,000 and 35,000 Oklahoma children have a parent in prison on any given day.
Children of incarcerated parents are five times more likely to become incarcerated than their peers.
By reading together, we can build greater empathy, strengthen community connections, and help people discover resources they may not know exist.
Read It. Learn More. Spark a Change.
Borrow the book. Explore resources. Join the conversation.
Lara Love Hardin is a literary agent, author, prison reform advocate, and president of True Literary. Her memoir, The Many Lives of Mama Love is a 2024 Oprah Book Club pick and a New York Times bestseller. She has an MFA in creative writing and apart from her own book, is also a five-time New York Times bestselling collaborative writer, including the #1 New York Times bestseller Designing Your Life, and 2018 Oprah Book Club pick, The Sun Does Shine, which she co-authored with Anthony Ray Hinton about his 30 years as an innocent man on Alabama’s death row. In 2019, she won a Christopher Award for her work “affirming the highest values of the human spirit,” nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and short-listed for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Lara is also the co-founder of The Gemma Project, a gender-responsive organization serving incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women with integrity and compassion.
Called, “courageous and inspiring” by Kirkus Reviews, her Oprah Book Club memoir, The Many Lives of Mama Love, recounts her slide from soccer mom to opioid addict to jailhouse shot-caller and her unlikely comeback as a highly successful ghostwriter. After being convicted of 32 felonies, she quickly learns that jail is a class system, finding the rules and bringing love and healing to her fellow inmates as she climbs the social ladder.
Upon her release, she reinvents herself as a ghostwriter, legally co-opting other people’s identities and getting to meet Oprah, meditate with The Dalai Lama, and have dinner with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. But the shadow of her past follows her, and she must learn how to navigate life as a felon and prove to herself that she is more good than bad, and much more. In her book and inspirational talks, Hardin shares her heartbreaking and tender journey from shame to redemption, despite a system that makes it almost impossible for us to move beyond the worst thing we have ever done.
