Ms. Kent is a member of the Board of Directors of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles and actively participates in raising private funds for the Los Angeles Public Library.
She has a Bachelor's degree from the University of Binghamton in New York and a Master's degree from Columbia University in New York.

Ms. Kent served as the Chair of the Executive Board of the Urban Libraries Council in 1999-2000 and was a member of the Board from 1994 - 2001.
She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Library and Information Resources.
She served as the President of the Public Library Association from 1987-1988 and was a member of the Council of the American Library Association from 1990 - 1998.

In 1998, she was the first recipient of the Charlie Robinson Award from the Public Library Association for excellence, creativity and innovation as a Public Library Director.
In 2001, The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Anderson School of Business selected Ms. Kent as the recipient of its annual Executive Leadership Award for her work in the “alignment of business and information technology strategies to deliver exceptional services to the citizens, business people and visitors” of Los Angeles. Ms. Kent was named “Librarian of the Year” by Library Journal in January, 2002.
In 2003, she received the American Library Association’s Joseph W. Lippincott Award for “distinguished service to the profession of librarianship”.

Ms. Kent has been a member of the Bertelsmann Foundation’s International Network of Public Libraries since 1999 and has been very involved in activities related to public libraries from an international perspective. She served as a member of the 2002 Advisory Committee for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Access to Learning Award which is given annually to a public library or similar organization outside the United States that has been innovative in providing free public access to information technology.

Ms. Kent is a Fellow of The Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities and a member of the Executive Board of the University of California at Irvine’s International Center for Writing and Translation.
She served on the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Reading Matters Task Force which is advisory to the Superintendent of Schools. She is a member of the Trusteeship, the Southern California Forum of the International Women’s Forum. She also serves as the President of the Los Angeles City General Managers’ Association.

Ms. Kent’s experience in public libraries includes work at the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library, the Finkelstein Memorial Library in Spring Valley, New York, the Tucson Public Library in Arizona and the Minneapolis Public Library in Minnesota.
Ms. Kent's experience includes two years as Managing Director of the Arizona Theatre Company, a professional regional theatre. She was an adjunct faculty member of the University of Arizona Graduate Library School where she taught courses in management, collection development and future trends in library service.

Ms. Kent serves as an independent consultant for libraries and nonprofit organizations in the areas of strategic planning, capital facilities planning, financial development and management. She has consulted for the San Francisco Public Library on its “Post Occupancy Evaluation of the Central Library” for the Seattle Public Library on its capital facilities needs and strategic planning and for the Kansas City Public Library on its plans for a new Central Library and strategic initiatives related to governance and funding.

Ms. Kent is the co-editor of Courtly Love in the Shopping Mall: Humanities Programs for Young Adults, published by the American Library Association in 1991.
She has written a regular column on fundraising for the Bottom Line and has had work published in many professional journals and monographs including “American Public Libraries: A Long Transformative Moment” an article in Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Fall, 1996). A recent publication is a jointly authored paper, “The Public Library: Idea -- Cyberplace – Physical Presence”, published by Bertelsmann in 2000 (www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/INPL ).