Resources at the Children's Lit Center

You may not know that the office for the National Center for the Study of Children's Literature is located in Arts & Letters 218. And if you weren't aware of the location, you probably didn't realize how many great resources reside here. In truth, the NCSCL has a plentiful and growing repository of books and resources, especially useful for graduate students getting their feet wet in the field of children's literature. Some of this cool stuff includes:

•  A huge collection of current picture, middle grade, and young adult books that publishers send to us for possible review by our book review service. Many of these are eventually sent over to SDSU's Love Library to add to the wonderful Juvenile Collection; some are sent to local schools as well. This program has been going on for years, and we have amassed more books than we can handle! 
• In fact, students and alumni are all welcome to drop by and check out a book to review. We encourage it and would love to post your response and thoughts on the books you choose. Drop by or send an email to NCSChildlit@gmail.com to find out when we are around.
• We have many scholarly books that serve as great resources, for graduate students in particular. And as Kelsey mentioned earlier, once the Unjournal begins the process of requesting books for review, the resources in the center office will undoubtedly grow with current academia too.
• You'll find a few theses from former children's lit grad students shelved here as well. If you have chosen (or are debating the choice) to embark on that journey instead of SDSU's portfolio option, you would certainly benefit from examining a few of them. What better way to learn what it entails than to hold a hefty, bound complete work in your hands.
• Lastly, two earnest grad assistants inhabit the office and thrive off the friendly hello once in a while amidst studying, working, and office hours. 

 

Publishing Response to Sandy Hook

As an offshoot of Alya's post from Monday, I wanted to share this short piece from Publishers Weekly. The article highlights the books and other goods that publishers and bookstore owners are sending to Newtown. In particular, Tanglewood Publishing is donating hundreds of copies of Audrey Penn's The Kissing Hand, which focuses on the great leap young children take when separating from their parents to go to school.

From Publishers Weekly:

"Kim Pescatelli, a Connecticut mother and knitter, knew that many schools use Audrey Penn’s The Kissing Hand (Tanglewood Books) in kindergarten to help ease children’s anxiety about being separated from their family during the school day. Her idea: to give a copy of the book along with a pair of Kissing Hand mittens with hearts on the palm to children in Newtown." Read the rest of the article here.

Thoughtful Pieces on Coping and Helping Children

The tragic events last Friday at Sandy Hook Elementary School have left a cold numbness on everyone's hearts and minds. As a graduate student of children's literature, I feel a pang whenever I glance at my children's books--part of why I pursue this is because of the light these stories bring to kids, the excitement, amazement, and comfort they glean from these silly and not-so-silly books.  As such, I particularly appreciated this article on the Huffington Post, about the comfort and strength reading offers in times of trauma. I especially think using children's books to help kids cope--be it focusing on loss, heroes, or families--enables them to connect their emotions more easily to positivity and hope.

Two other thoughtful pieces on how to guide children through a traumatic experience can be found on:
Educating Alice
The Moving Castle

Diverse Books for Diverse Readers in the Classroom

An interesting article about diversity (or lack thereof) of children's lit in classrooms cropped up on the NY Times a few days ago. Speaking directly about young Latino/a readers, the article raises questions about the accessibility of multicultural children's books that speak to a child's particular culture. I've mentioned my own experience in lack of exposure to my cultural background from books as a child, and those reflections along with this article make the issue abundantly clear: the books are out there--they do exist--but their lack of presence in schools makes it all the more difficult for kids to be aware of and seek out those books.

So how to work around that? Well, there are countless diverse blogs for one, you need only run a search to find one you like. But the NY Times has pulled together their own resource as well: Books to match Diverse Readers, a collection of first chapters from diverse books for second to fourth graders highlighting black, Latino, Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native cultures.

Nevertheless, as more books get exposure, our collective awareness and understanding gets stronger too. Authors like Julia Alvarez, Pam Muñoz Ryan, Alma Flor Ada and Gary Soto are familiar, but can we expand that? I personally feel uninformed in many ways, and hope to change that quite soon, if only to be able to recognize authors and identify the wealth of their works in a snap. On a side note, I happened to play a pick-up tennis game with Gary Soto in Berkeley a few years ago (which was totally awesome by the way). I hadn't the slightest clue who he was though until he finally shared with me bit by bit, yikes.

Election Day

Today the time has come to exercise your right and power to vote. There are many issues at stake during this election, so whether it's the presidency or the propositions that compel you, just make sure to make your voice and your choice heard.

A fair list of children's books about voting that reflect on the nature and importance of this democratic process can be found on Good Reads and Education World. And if you're interested in exploring the entire election process in the guise of fictional characters, take a look at The Horn Book's KidLit Presidential Election. Those polls may be closing early, but don't forget your own polling places will be open until the evening.

Access to the New Review of Chlidren's Literature and Librarianship

The New Review of Children's Literature and Librarianship is excited to offer FREE access to an article from its recent archives 18(1): "Evolving Tools for Information Literacy from Models of Information Behavior" by Andrew K. Shenton and Naomi V. Hay-Gibson.

The New Review of Children's Literature and Librarianship has established itself as one of the leading publications for the exchange of ideas and the sharing of experiences in the provision of literature for children and young people. The journal is multidisciplinary in nature, providing opportunities for the 'pure' discussion of children's literature, and of issues relating to libraries for young people.

The journal fosters the sharing of ideas between those who study children's literature, and those who provide it. The New Review of Children's Literature and Librarianship welcomes articles covering:

    * Management of library services to children and adolescents
    * Education issues affecting library services
    * User education and the promotion of services
    * Staff education and training
    * Collection development and management
    * Critical assessments of children's and adolescent literature
    * Book and media selection
    * Research in literature and library services for children and adolescents

For more information about the New Review of Children's Literature and Librarianship, please visit the journal's webpage: www.tandfonline.com/RCLL

Editor
Dr. Sally Maynard
Loughborough University

Publication Details
Volume 18, 2012
2 issues per year
Print ISSN 1361-4541
Online ISSN 1740-7885

Two thoughtful essays about 9/11

Today marks the anniversary of the tragic events of September 11, 2001. We invite our readers to read the essay below, written by former NCSCL director and SDSU Emeritus Professor Jerry Griswold for the Irish magazine "Inis," in which he discusses how things changed in his classes after the terrorist acts of 2001.

http://blog.parents-choice.org/2010/09/reading-differently-after-september-11/

Another thoughtful response to the events of 9/11, this time by the late great David Foster Wallace, is linked here:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/9-11-the-view-from-the-midwest-20110819

from the School Library Journal blog, excerpt, with thanks

Top 100 Children’s Novels #27: Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban, illustrated by Lillian Hoban

June 5th, 2012 #27 Bread and James for Frances by Russell Hoban, illustrated by Lillian Hoban (1964)

YALSA Journal Announces Rolling Publication Schedule, reprint, excerpt

Editor’s Message: Continuous Publishing

April 30, 2012

By Sandra Hughes-Hassell, JRLYA member editor

Welcome to the Journal for Research on Libraries and Young Adults. Beginning with this issue, JRLYA will move to a dynamic publication schedule. As soon as a manuscript has met our rigorous review criteria, it will be published online. The JRLYA advisory board believes that moving to a continuous schedule will allow YALSA to provide high quality, original research from scholars in our field in a more timely manner. This change also aligns with YALSA’s use of electronic and social media to communicate, collaborate, and educate its members. As new manuscripts are added to JRLYA, they will be publicized in YALSA E-News and via YALSA’s social networking tools.

Peter Hunt on research resources in children's literature, reprinted with thanks from Oxford Bibliographies on-line

Children's Literature

Peter Hunt

Introduction

The study of children’s literature as an academic discipline has developed since the 1980s from its roots in education and librarianship to its place in departments of literature and childhood studies. Although its practitioners position themselves at different points on the spectrum between “book-oriented” and “child-oriented,” the study is held together by the “presence” of some concept of child and childhood in the texts. The distinctions that apply in other literary systems between “literature” and “popular literature” or “literature” and “nonliterature” are not necessarily useful in this field. Nevertheless, criticism tends to fracture between a liberal-humanist and educationalist view that children’s literature should adhere to and inculcate “traditional” literary and cultural values and a more postmodern and theoretical view that texts for children are part of a complex cultural matrix and should be treated nonjudgmentally. In addition, the discipline is multi- and interdisciplinary as well as multimedia: its theory derives from disciplines such as literature, cultural and ideological studies, history, and psychology, and its applications range from literacy to bibliography. Consequently, children’s literature can be defined and limited in many (sometimes conflicting) ways: one major problem for scholars is that the term children’s is sometimes taken to transcend national and language barriers, thus potentially producing a discipline of unmanageable proportions. As a result, this article is eclectic, but it excludes specialist studies to which children’s books are peripheral or merely instrumental, such as folklore or teaching techniques. Children’s literature is also studied comparatively and internationally, with German and Japanese writing being particularly important. This article confines itself to English-language texts and translations into English.

Reference Resources

The major reference books (Carpenter and Prichard 1984, Watson 2001, Zipes 2006) are designed for the general reader, with succinct entries and extensive illustration. Hunt 2004, Hunt 2006, and Rudd 2010 are aimed at students of children’s literature and provide a basis for the study of the subject (see also Introductions and Guides). For the online resources, a distinction can be made between the academic International Research Society for Children’s Literature and the highly practical International Board on Books for Young People.

• Carpenter, Humphrey, and Mari Prichard. The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

  E-mail Citation »

  Although nontheoretical and increasingly dated, this pioneering work remains an essential text. The more than 2,000 entries cover authors, characters, books, themes, and genres and a selection of national literatures.

• Hunt, Peter, ed. International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature. 2d ed. 2 vols. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.

  E-mail Citation »

  A two-volume collection of one hundred nineteen 6,000-word essays commissioned from world experts, including Iona Opie, Margaret Meek, Jean Perrot, Perry Nodelman, Hans-Heino Ewers, and Anne Pellowski. The text attempts to cover every aspect of the theory and practice of children’s literature; forty-six of the essays are concerned with the literature of specific countries, continents, or regions.

• Hunt, Peter, ed. Children’s Literature: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. 4 vols. Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.

  E-mail Citation »

  The ninety-nine reprinted essays in this four-volume set are the most important critical or theoretical statements about or discussions of virtually all aspects of children’s literature. The set includes work by almost every major critic writing in English; there are twenty sections, the largest being “The Theory Debate.”

• International Board on Books for Young People.

  E-mail Citation »

  Information about contacts in seventy-five countries, devoted to the promotion and distribution of children’s books and to details of the international journal Bookbird.

• International Research Society for Children’s Literature.

  E-mail Citation »

  The IRSCL website contains not only news about the society’s activities, but also information about conferences; calls for papers; a book review section; and links to children’s book collections, documentation centers and libraries, research centers, research societies, and other related sites across the world.

• Rudd, David, ed. The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature. Routledge Companions. London and New York: Routledge, 2010.

  E-mail Citation »

  Rudd’s Companion provides an extremely wide-ranging guide to the technical aspects of criticism and theory of children’s literature. The first half comprises eleven long essays on major themes and issues, such as gender, narratology, race, and young adult fiction; the second, an extensive annotated glossary of names and terms, a full bibliography, and a time line.

• Watson, Victor, ed. The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

  E-mail Citation »

  With more than 2,500 entries from more than 200 contributors, this encyclopedic volume covers books and authors that have “made a significant impact on young readers anywhere in the world.” There is particular emphasis on illustrators and on the importance of multimedia texts.

• Zipes, Jack, ed. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature. 4 vols. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

  E-mail Citation »

  Four-volume general reference work, with particular emphasis on biographies of authors and illustrators.

Thanks to Helen Wang for these resources

Children's fiction in China

By Helen Wang, published March 27, 2012

At last week’s China Fiction Book Club, in London, Nicky brought along two Chinese children’s books that she’s been reviewing: Wu Meizhen’s The Unusual Princess (translated by Petula Parris Huang) and Shen Shixi’s Jackal and Wolf (translated by me).

There are four children’s authors coming to the London Book Fair: Shen Shixi and Wu Meizhen; and Zheng Yuanjie and Yang Hongying. As no biographical information for any of them is provided on the LBF programme, I’ve created author entries for them on Paper Republic.

I also tried to find out more about children’s literature in China. The most authoritative reference I could find was Mary Ann Farquhar’s Children’s Literature in China: from Lu Xun to Mao Zedong (1999). But surely there must be something more recent that covers the 1970s to the 21st century? I’ll put the contents of Farquhar’s book on Resources for Translators, in the hope that others can offer improvements.

At the same time, it is cheering to see that there are many more books for children than there used to be. A few examples:

http://www.cynthialeitichsmith.com/lit_resources/diversity/asian_am/chinese.html
Features and reviews Chinese and Chinese American literature for children.

http://www.asiabookroom.com/AsiaBookRoom/_Children_Teenagers_China_Fiction.html
There is an impressive list of titles (for sale) on this website: picture books for younger children and novels for older readers and young adults. There’s a variety of English language, Chinese language and bilingual Chinese/English.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/?category_id=399796
Has a special section ‘China and Chinese — Children's fiction’ (for sale)

Research Resource at Central Michigan University, excerpt

Clarke Historical Library is home to $40 million children’s book collection

By Justin Hicks on March 22, 2012 in Featured, University

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Eugene Thwing's "The Man from Red-Keg" is one of the many antique children's books on display at Charles V. Park Library on CMU's campus. Thwing's book was published in 1905. (Zack Wittman/Staff Photographer)

Famous novelist C.S. Lewis once said: “I write for children because a children’s story is the best art form for saying what I have to say.”

Children’s literature is of extreme importance for students because it’s where reading and learning about culture begins, said Anne Alton, a Central Michigan University English language and literature professor with a graduate degree in children’s literature.

CMU is home to the Clarke Historical Library, which houses a collection of antique kids books worth an estimated $40 million. It increases in value by an estimated $1 to $1.5 million each year, said Frank Boles, director of the Clarke Historical Library.

from the office of Govenor Brown, New California Poet Laureate, reprint

(Thanks to Phillip Serrato for the notice below and for bring Juan Felipe Herrera to SDSU not long ago--

-- and well done! to the students, faculty, and others who "Read Out" today at the Read Out--

a.a.)

Governor Brown Appoints California Poet Laureate

3-21-2012


SACRAMENTO – Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. today appointed Juan Felipe Herrera to the position of California Poet Laureate.

Mr. Herrera, 63, is the author of twenty-eight books and currently serves as the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. He was a professor and chair of Chicano and Latin American Studies at California State University, Fresno, from 1990 to 2004 and a teaching assistant fellow at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa from 1988 to 1990.

Herrera’s work has received wide critical acclaim including numerous national and international awards. In a 2008 review of his work, Stephen Burt of the New York Times wrote, “All life, all art, involves boundaries, if only those of birth and death. Some poets keep us conscious of those boundaries; others, like Herrera, discover their powers by defying them. Many poets since the 1960s have dreamed of a new hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else: an art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual too. Many poets have tried to create such an art: Herrera is one of the first to succeed.”

Upon his receipt of the PEN Beyond Margins Award in 2009, the University of Arizona Press wrote, “For nearly four decades Juan Felipe Herrera has documented his experience as a Chicano in the United States and Latin America through stunning, memorable poetry that is both personal and universal in its impact, themes, and approach. Often political, never fainthearted, his career has been marked by tremendous virtuosity and a unique sensibility for uncovering the unknown and the unexpected.”

The son of migrant workers from Mexico, Mr. Herrera earned a Bachelor’s Degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, a Master of Arts in Social Anthropology from Stanford University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa. He was elected to the Board of Chancellors for the Academy of American Poets in 2011, was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry in 2010 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry in 2009.

This position requires Senate Confirmation, and the California Arts Council provides an annual stipend. Herrera is a Democrat.

Links:

“Let Me Tell You What A Poem Brings” (Juan Felipe Herrera, 2008)

VIDEO: At Riverside County Library in 2010, Prof. Herrera explains why libraries matter:

Treasure Trove of Primary Research Material at freelibrary.org

by Adrienne Pruitt, Special Collections Archivist
March 22, 2012

We have many fantastic children’s literature collections at the Free Library, including the Lloyd Alexander papers, a Beatrix Potter collection, the Tomi Ungerer papers, and the Virginia Lee Burton papers, and we wrote blog posts about most of them. I and my assistants have been working for the past two years to catalogue all of this material and get finding aids and digitized items online. Our finding aids can be seen here http://libwww.freelibrary.org/ead/ and all of the digitized items can be seen here http://libwww.freelibrary.org/diglib/DigLibLst.cfm?chk=13&srch=1&keyword=, with more to come soon. Thanks again for helping us raise awareness of these materials. We’ve seen a lot more research use in the past few years and hope it continues.

New Volume, Children's Literature Association Quarterly Table of Contents, via Project Muse

Volume 37, Number 1, Spring 2012

Table of Contents

Critical Cross-overs
pp. 1-3 |
Katharine Capshaw Smith

“What Young Men and Women Do When Their Country is Attacked”: Interventionist Discourse and the Rewriting of Violence in Adolescent Literature of the Iraq War
pp. 4-26
David Kieran

Child Prison Narratives of the 1930s as Religious Filmmaking
pp. 27-42
Anne Morey


When Clothes Don’t Make the Man: Sartorial Style, Conspicuous Consumption, and Class Passing in Lothar Meggendorfer’s Scenes in the Life of a Masher
pp. 43-65
Michelle Ann Abate


Reminders of Rugby in the Halls of Hogwarts: The Insidious Influence of the School Story Genre on the Works of J. K. Rowling
pp. 66-85
Elizabeth A. Galway

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events: Daniel Handler and Marketing the Author
pp. 86-107
Kendra Magnusson

Books Received
pp. 108-109
Mark I. West

Keywords for Children’s Literature (review)
pp. 110-112
Claudia Mills

Telling Children’s Stories: Narrative Theory and Children’s Literature (review)
pp. 112-116
Richard Flynn

The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films (review)
pp. 116-118
Ian Wojcik-Andrews

New Directions in Picture book Research (review)
pp. 119-121
Jane M. Gangi

The Alice Behind Wonderland (review)
pp. 121-124
Jan Susina

Constructions of Childhood and Youth in Old French Narrative (review)
pp. 125-127
Lisette Luton

The Order of Harry Potter: Literary Skill in the Hogwarts Epic (review)
pp. 127-130
Todd Ide

from the Daily Nebraskan, excerpt

UNL professor publishes study examining nature in children’s books

By Sarah Miller

Wednesday, March 7, 2012


When J. Allen Williams Jr. was a kid, his mother read her favorite book to him: "The Secret Garden."

"I wanted my own secret garden," Williams said.

The book had such an impact on him, that he and his siblings planted flowers in the forest behind their house and actually grew a garden of their own.

Williams, a sociology professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, recently published a study examining the use of the natural environment in children's books.

His research, which began about seven years ago, found that during the last several decades, nature's prevalence has decreased in children's books.

Williams said this relates to society's increasing isolation from the natural world.

"I was surprised that it was as severe as it was," he said.

The research concluded that built environments were depicted in 58 percent of the images and were the major environment 45 percent of the time. Natural environments were present in 46 percent of the images and were the major environment only 32 percent of the time.

"As people have become less connected to the natural world, it occurs to them less, so they're less likely to write and include them in their books," Williams said.

The study examined books from 1938 to 2008 that received Caldecott Medal awards or honors. This turned into an examination of nearly 300 books and 8,100 images.

from StarNews Online, Wilmington NC, excerpt

Guest readers bring black literature to kids

Daffinette Dudley reads 'Picking Peas for a Penny' to kindergarten students at Sunset Park Elementary in Wilmington on Friday.

By Si Cantwell

Saturday, February 25, 2012

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi ... – Langston Hughes

As Chrystal Fray read Langston Hughes' poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” to second-graders at Sunset Park Elementary on Friday afternoon, the kids were rapt with attention.

Fray was among the guest readers participating in the annual African-American Read-In Chain, part of the school's Black History Month activities.

Full article: http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20120225/ARTICLES/120229784

reprint

Corner: The latest kids' books to win the Coretta Scott King Awards

02/22/2012

• KAREN MACPHERSON, Scripps Howard News Service

Celebrate Black History Month by reading the latest winners of the Coretta Scott King Awards, given annually to the best children's books written and illustrated by African-Americans.
Created in 1970, the Coretta Scott King Awards are named for the late wife of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and are designed to highlight the best children's books created each year by African-American authors and artists. The awards are sponsored by the American Library Association, and the winning books are chosen annually by a group of librarians and children's-book experts.
For more information about these awards, go to: http://www.ala.org/emiert/cskbookawards. To see a list of the books that have previously won the award, go to: http://www.ala.org/emiert/cskbookawards/recipients.

From The Telegraph, for Dickens' 200th Birthday, a Question about Contemporary Readers

Modern children 'lack the attention to read Dickens'

A generation of schoolchildren lack the skills needed to read Dickens after being “reared on dreadful television programmes”, a leading author has warned.

Many children have such a poor attention span that they struggle to get through a Charles Dickens novel, it is claimed.

By Graeme Paton, Education Editor

05 Feb 2012

Claire Tomalin, the acclaimed biographer, said many pupils had such poor attention spans that they were unable to access books such as Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities.

Speaking as the country prepares to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens' birth, she said his works were still “amazingly relevant” to young people but most struggled to read whole texts.

The comments come amid continuing concerns over children's attitudes towards reading in school and the home.

According to figures, the number of pupils taking a GCSE in English literature has dropped by 12 per cent in the last four years – dipping below 500,000 for the first time.

Ministers have warned that the demands placed on schoolchildren have been “too low for too long”, with fewer than one in 100 teenagers who sat the most popular English exam last year basing their answers on novels published prior to 1900.

Yale Environment 360, excerpt

e360 digest

31 Jan 2012: Depictions of Natural World

Declining in Children’s Books, Study Says

A new study finds a significant decline in the depiction of the natural world and animals in U.S. children’s books in recent decades, a trend researchers say may reflect society’s increasing isolation from nature. In an analysis of 296 Caldecott Medal-winning books from 1938 to 2008, a team of researchers led by University of Nebraska-Lincoln sociologist J. Allen Williams Jr. found that images of natural environments and interactions with wild animals have declined steadily. Meanwhile, depictions of built environments, such as houses and buildings, have become increasingly prevalent since the late 1960s, according to the study published in the journal Sociological Inquiry. “These findings suggest that today’s generation of children are not being socialized, at least through this source, toward an understanding and appreciation of the natural world and the place of humans within it,” the authors wrote.