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Every
spring for the past 33 years, children's literature
afficionados have gathered on the campus of The University
of Southern Mississippi for the annual Children's Book
Festival. The original purpose of the book festival
was to introduce the University library's new collection
of children's literature begun in 1966. This collection
was later named in honor of its founder, Dr. Lena Y.
de Grummond.
The
first festival, held in 1968, was an international book
fair, highlighting children's literature from throughout
the world.
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The
focus changed slightly in the second year and a new feature
was added - the awarding of a silver medallion for the distinguished
body of work of an author or illustrator. Lois Lenski was
the first recipient in 1969 and was followed by a veritable
who's who of children's literature: Ernest H. Shepard, Roger
Duvoisin, Marcia Brown, Barbara Cooney, Scott O'Dell, Madeleine
L'Engle, Leonard Everett Fisher, Ezra Jack Keats, Maurice
Sendak, Beverly Cleary, Katherine Paterson, Arnold Lobel,
Jean Fritz, Richard Peck, James Marshall, Tomie de Paola,
Eric Carle, E.L. Konigsburg, Russell Freedman, and the 2000
recipient, David Macaulay.
A crowd
of more than 600 librarians, teachers, and others interested
in children's literature were on hand to honor Caldecott Medalist
David Macaulay at this year's Children's Book Festival, held
March 22-24. Macaulay delighted the audience with "All Roads
Lead to Rome," a slide presentation about the trials and tribulations
surrounding the creation of Rome Antics, published
in 1997. He fell in love with Rome during his college days
and wanted to prepare a guide to its attractions. Unsure of
how he would present the information, Macaulay struggled with
plot, perspective, characters and format, developing four
totally different ideas before creating the one that finally
worked. Rome Antics involves a pigeon, who, while carrying
an important message, takes the reader on a unique tour of
both ancient and modern parts of Rome.
Macaulay
was born in Burton-on-Trent, England, in 1946. When Macaulay
was eleven, his father took a job in America; the family moved
to New Jersey, and five years later, to Rhode Island. It was
during his high school years that Macaulay developed an interest
in drawing and amused his classmates with sketches of the
Beatles. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD),
where he received a bachelor's in architecture, and spent
his fifth year in the European Honors Program, studying in
Rome, Herculaneum, and Pompeii. After graduation in 1969,
Macaulay worked as a junior high school art teacher, an interior
designer, and a teacher at RISD.
During
this time, Macaulay created preliminary studies for several
books which he took to Houghton Mifflin, where Walter Lorraine,
then manager of the children's department, saw the possibilities
in his illustrations. Spurred on by Lorraine's enthusiasm
for a book about cathedrals, Macaulay went to Amiens, France,
where he spent two weeks sketching the cathedral during the
day and writing at night. The resulting book, Cathedral:
The Story of Its Construction, published in 1973, received
a Caldecott Honor Medal and was named one of the ten New York
Times Best Illustrated Books of the Year.
This
initial success was followed by an astonishing seven books
in seven years:City (1974), Pyramid (1975),
Underground (1976), Castle, (1977), Great
Moments in Architecture (1978), Motel of the Mysteries
(1979), and Unbuilding (1980). Help! Let Me
Out!, Mill, The Amazing Brain, BAAA, and Why the Chicken
Crossed the Road preceded the 1988 publication of The
Way Things Work, a magnum opus of technology. It is an
illustrated guide to the principles and mechanics of hundreds
of machines, from the zipper to the airplane, the telephone
to the television, the car to the computer, the key to your
home to the atomic bomb.
Already
the recipient of two Caldecott Honor Medals, Macaulay received
the Caldecott Medal in 1991 for Black and White. Quite
different from his other titles, Black and White is
a picture book with four brief "stories" that overlap in a
collage effect. Macaulay's books have sold more than two million
copies in the United States alone and have been translated
into a dozen languages. Four of his titles -- Cathedral,
Castle, City, and Pyramid -- have been made into
PBS television programs. He is now working on a five-part
television series on engineering.
Other
speakers at this year's festival were Will Hobbs, Anita Lobel,
Diane Wolkstein, and Ezra Jack Keats Lecturer, Richard Peck.
WILL
HOBBS
Author
Will Hobbs receives inspiration for his books partly from
personal experience and partly from his reading. The majority
of his award-winning novels are set in the wilderness of the
southwestern United States, where Hobbs and his wife, Jean,
live in a self-constructed rock house. Hobbs writes about
the things he loves most in life -- white water rafting, climbing,
mountaineering, backpacking, and the wilderness in general.
One glance at the compelling dust jackets for Far North,
River Thunder, Ghost Canoe, and The Maze reveals
the adventure and excitement of the story within.
Hobbs
was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1947, but his father's
position as an engineer in the Air Force caused the family
to move frequently. He and his family lived in the Panama
Canal Zone, Virginia, Alaska, California, and Texas. Hobbs
studied English at Stanford University, receiving a B.A. in
1969 and an M.A. in 1971. He began his seventeen-year career
as a teacher of reading and English in 1973 in the public
schools of Colorado. It was not until 1980 that Hobbs began
his first novel, Bearstone. Six different manuscripts
and eight years later, it was accepted for publication. It
was an outstanding first novel, chosen as an ALA Best Book
for Young Adults, among other honors.
Bearstone
was soon followed by Downriver (1991), Beardance
(1993), Far North (1996), The Maze (1998),
and Jason's Gold (1999). In all, Hobbs has written
eleven novels for young adults and two picture book stories,
the first of which is Beardream, a companion book to
his novels Bearstone and Beardance. All three
titles deal with the relationship between native peoples and
bears.
Hobbs'
stories of adventure and daring are favorites with adolescents
of both sexes, and he is in demand as a speaker both for adults
and for his young readers. Hobbs at tributes his writing success
to the many years he spent in the classroom and tries to maintain
that closeness through numerous school visits. He freely offers
advice to young writers, "Put the readers in your characters'
shoes. Let them smell, hear, see, taste, and touch through
your characters' senses." Learning to write, he says, takes
practice and dedication, like learning to play a musical instrument
or a sport.
Hobbs'
one hope is that his novels tell a good story that will keep
the reader turning page after page, hating to see the story
end. His list of awards and honors indicates that his stories
are well-respected by both the adults and the children who
evaluate his work. Six of his novels were named Best Books
for Young Adults by the American Library Association, Downriver
was named one of the 100 Best of the Best Young Adult Books
from the past 25 years, and Ghost Canoe received the
Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1998 for Best Young Adult Mystery.
His books have won many other awards, including the California
Young Reader Medal, the Western Writers of America Spur Award,
the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, the Colorado Book
Award, and nominations to over thirty state awards lists that
are chosen by children.
ANITA
LOBEL
Born in
Poland in 1934, Anita Kempler had a normal childhood until
she was five years old, when Hitler's troops occupied her
home town of Krakow. There was a better chance of survival
if the family was separated, so Anita and her younger brother
spent four and a half years posing as the children of their
Catholic Polish nanny. They were eventually captured and sent
to a concentration camp in Germany where they remained until
freed by the Swedish Red Cross in April 1945. Astonishingly,
they were reunited with their parents in Sweden several years
later.
The family
emigrated to the United States in 1952, where Anita completed
her high school education at Washington Irving High School
and then went on to the Pratt Institute to continue her studies
in art. It was here that she met fellow student Arnold Lobel:
she acted in a play that he directed. They both graduated
from Pratt in 1955 and were married the same year. In the
early years of their marriage, Anita designed textiles, while
Arnold wrote and illustrated children's books.
Arnold's
mentor and editor, Susan Hirschman, suggested that Anita might
try her hand at children's books. She soon discovered an ability
for both storytelling and drawing and produced Sven's Bridge
in 1965, published by Greenwillow. Hirschman's ability to
spot new talent was confirmed by the editors of the New
York Times when they named Sven's Bridge as one
of the Best Illustrated Books of the Year. Lobel's new career
was off to a wonderful start, and the next year saw the publication
of The Troll Music and Puppy Summer, followed
by Potatoes, Potatoes in 1967, and The Seamstress
of Salzburg and Under a Mushroom in 1970. Although
Lobel often both writes and illustrates her stories, she has
illustrated works of other authors such as Charlotte Huck,
Charlotte Zolotow, Janet Quin-Harkin, Meindert De Jong, and
F.N. Monjo. Some of her most successful collaborations have
been with her husband, Arnold, who wrote How the Rooster
Saved the Day (1977), A Treeful of Pigs (1979),
On Market Street (1981), and The Rose in My Garden
(1984). She received a Caldecott Honor Medal in 1982 for On
Market Street and the Boston Globe Horn Book Illustration
Honor award was given to both On Market Street and
The Rose in My Garden.
Recent
collaborations include The Cat and the Cook and other fables
of Krylov by Ethel Heins (1995), Toads and Diamonds
by Charlotte Huck (1995), Mangaboom by Charlotte Pomerantz
(1997), and My Day in the Garden by Miela Ford (1999).
Lobel
joined a writers' group in the early 1990s because she had
always "liked the idea of writing words without pictures."
After writing "any old thing" for some period of time, Lobel
began to focus on the experiences of her childhood. She showed
her writing to her longtime editor Susan Hirschman in the
summer of 1997. Hirschman saw that these short episodes could
easily be transformed into a book and Lobel began working
with Greenwillow's executive editor Virginia Duncan. No
Pretty Pictures, A Child of War was published in 1998
and is a gripping memoir of surviving the Holocaust. No
Pretty Pictures received unanimous critical acclaim and
was nominated for the National Book Award for Young People's
Literature in 1998. Her newest book, One Lighthouse, One
Moon, published this year by Greenwillow, presents the
days of the week, the months of the year, and numbers from
one to ten through the activities of a cat and people in and
around a lighthouse.
DIANE
WOLKSTEIN
Multitalented
Diane Wolkstein is a master storyteller, mythologist, author,
and teacher who has traveled extensively in Europe, Italy,
Haiti, Canada, and throughout the United States. Wolkstein
was born in New York City and spent her childhood in a New
Jersey suburb. She received a B.A. in drama from Smith College
and supplemented her formal education with a trip to Europe,
where she taught English and studied pantomime in Paris. She
soon found that her greatest love was telling stories to children,
so, upon her return to the United States, she enrolled in
the Bank Street College of Education, where she earned an
M.A. in childhood education.
It was
in the summer of 1967 that she applied for the position of
"recreational director" within New York City's Parks and Recreation
Department. Her storytelling career had begun and, for $40
a week, Wolkstein visited two parks a day, five days a week.
Her fame spread and she soon began to tell stories to families
at the statue of Hans Christian Andersen in Central Park.
More than 25 years later, these Saturday morning sessions
are legendary and have been celebrated by articles in the
New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The
Village Voice.
Wolkstein's
talents do not stop with the oral interpretation of stories.
She is the author of more than twenty award-winning books
of folklore. The Magic Orange Tree and Other Haitian Folktales
(1978) and Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth (1983)
have become classics. Other titles include White Wave
(1979), The Banza (1981), Little Mouse's Painting
(1992), Esther's Story (1996), Bouki Dances the
Kokioko (1997), Glass Mountain (1999), and Grass
Slipper (2000). Three of Wolkstein's albums --Hans
Christian Andersen in Central Park, Romping, and The
Story of Joseph -- have won the Parents' Choice Gold Seal
Award.
RICHARD
PECK
This year's
Ezra Jack Keats Lecturer is no stranger to the University
of Southern Mississippi. Critically acclaimed young adult
author Richard Peck received the USM Medallion in 1991 and
was a featured speaker that same year at the International
Children's Literature Association conference hosted on the
USM campus. Peck is a frequent contributor to the de Grummond
Children's Literature Collection whose holdings include typescripts
and related materials for nearly thirty of his novels for
both young adults and adults.
Born in
Decatur, Illinois in 1934, Richard Peck formed an early love
of learning and literature while listening to his mother read
to him. He received a scholarship to attend DePauw University
and graduated in 1956. He spent his junior year at the University
of Exeter in southwest England, where he took most of his
literature courses. Shortly after graduation he entered the
army and served in Germany for two years. His writing ability
kept him safely in office jobs and led him to ghostwrite sermons
for chaplains of all denominations. He went directly from
the army to graduate school at Southern Illinois University
where he earned his way as a teaching assistant, graduating
in 1959. He did further graduate study at Washington University
from 1960 to 1961, and later took a position teaching high
school in Northbrook, Illinois. He taught school for ten years
before it "had begun to turn into something that looked weirdly
like psychiatric social work." He searched for a new way to
communicate with the young and found it in his writing. His
first novel, Don't Look and It Won't Hurt (1972) is
about a teenage pregnancy told from the viewpoint of the young
mother's younger sister. Enormously successful, this novel
was the start of Peck's distinguished writing career. The
most difficult young adult problems of suicide, drugs, alcohol,
death of a loved one, unwanted pregnancy, and rape find realistic
and unflinching treatment in Peck's works. His novels have
found an enthusiastic young adult audience and have won critical
acclaim for their realism and emotional power.
Thirty
years later, he has written more than twenty-five novels for
young readers including Representing Super Doll, Are You
in the House Alone?, Ghosts I Have Been, Father Figure, Secrets
of the Shopping Mall, Voices After Midnight, The Great Interactive
Dream Machine, and Lost in Cyberspace. He has received
numerous awards and honors for his body of work, including
the 1990 Margaret A. Edwards Award, a prestigious award sponsored
by the Young Adult Library Services Association of the American
Library Association in cooperation with School Library Journal,
the 1990 National Council of Teachers of English/ ALAN Award
for outstanding contributions to young adult literature, and
the 1991 University of Southern Mississippi Medallion. His
books are always among those selected as ALA's Best Books
for Young Adults; his A Long Way From Chicago received
the 1999 Newbery Honor Book Medal and was the finalist for
the 1998 National Book Award.
For the
full text of Richard Peck's spectacular lecture, Books
for the Readers of the 21st Century, click on the
title.
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