By: Jen Cywinski and Megan Donnelly

Yumi and her children, wearing her homemade outfits

Originally from Japan, Yumi Rudy has been a part-time Information Resources and Services Specialist at the Penn State Harrisburg Library since 2016. However, she isn’t new to Penn State! She first worked at Harrisburg’s library in 2003 as a graduate student, where she met her husband Glenn, also a graduate student. She has also worked part-time for Fredricksen Library in Camp Hill for the last 13 years.

Yumi graduated from Soka University in Tokyo with a B.A. in Education and earned her M.A. in American Studies at Penn State Harrisburg. She is also certified to teach the Japanese language to non-Japanese speakers and, along with her husband, translated all of the dialogue from the video game Wachenroder for fun.

Yumi has always been interested in life outside of Japan and in 1996 studied at Oxford University Hartford College for the summer. The next year she spent six months in Tennessee where she learned to make quilts by hand. She says of her experience, “Those two places were very much different. I enjoyed the British atmosphere yet still I loved the southern culture in Tennessee and I felt very much comfortable being there.”

In her free time, Yumi enjoys sewing, knitting, and reading biographies or historical books, particularly about the U.S. Civil War. She’s also considering combining her interests by creating a quilt using Civil War reproduction fabric. You might be wondering how she makes time for work, her husband, her four kids, and her hobbies. The answer is that Yumi wakes at 3 a.m. every morning to enjoy her interests, even when she closed the Harrisburg library at 11 p.m. the previous night!