Brittany Paloma Fiedler and Brittani Sterling (both Libraries) and James Cheng, with the Library of Congress, presented, "We're Still Here at Mid-Career: Retention of Academic Librarians of Color and Our Lived Experiences," at the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) 2023 Conference, Forging the Future. The presentation included a discussion of how librarianship and academia fail to retain BIPOC employees, and drew from interviews with 25 academic librarians of color who self-identified as mid-career. This presentation shared the preliminary findings of these interviews, which were funded by an American Library Association Diversity Research Grant, which provided insights on why BIPOC colleagues choose to stay in the library profession or change their careers. The presentation included commonalities of the people, policies, and systems that supported participants as academic librarians and those that have stopped them from accomplishing their goals.