Here’s what I’ll be up to next weekend. i hope to see you there. I am also presenting a session about the Teacher Read Aloud Book Club we had at William Walker Elementary last year.
The Oregon Association of School Libraries is “Branching Out’ and sending an open invitation to all educators to join them for the annual Fall Conference. We’re thrilled that the conference is moving to Portland for 2013. Jesuit High School in southwest Portland will be hosting this year. We will still have the same high quality keynote speakers, authors, workshops, concurrent sessions and vendors as before.
Click HERE for registration information.
FRIDAY EVENING – AUTHOR DESSERT: A.S KING
Growing up in Pennsylvania, Amy Sarig King (who writes under the name A. S. King) was an avid reader and thought about being a writer. What motivated her to sit down and start typing on her Swedish typewriter was reading one book a day for six months, with Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses physically moving her into the writer’s chair. Along her circuitous career path, she has been a rare poultry breeder, photographer, master printer, contractor, summer camp counselor, adult literacy teacher, and pizza delivery driver. After writing seven novels over a fifteen year time span, King’s first book The Dust of 100 Dogs was published in 2009. Her subsequent writing has won numerous awards. Please Ignore Vera Dietz was a 2011 Printz Award Honor Book, as well as an Edgar Award nominee, while Everybody Sees the Ants was one of YALSA’s 2012 Top Ten Books for Young Adults and an Andre Norton Award finalist. Her last YA novel, Ask the Passengers, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for young adult literature, a Lambda Literary Award, and a spot on School Library Journal’s Best Books 2012 list. Three new books will be published in 2013 with King’s work in them (two anthologies and a novel, Reality Boy), which we certainly won’t want to miss.
Although she was born in Puerto Rico, Carmen “T” Bernier-Grand lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and their bilingual dogs, Falcon and Lily. She is a multiple national and local award-winning author of eleven books for children and young adults. Recently, she wrote Our Lady Of Guadalupe, as well as the biography in verse Sonia Sotomayor: Supreme Court Justice. In addition to biographies of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Alicia Alonso, Don Luis Muňoz Marín, Pablo Picasso, and César Chavez, she is also well-known for her two collections of folktales, Juan Bobo: Four Folktales from Puerto Rico and Shake It, Morena! And Other Folklore from Puerto Rico.
When Carmen was growing up in Puerto Rico, she had no idea that she would become a writer. Her teachers always told her that she had a great imagination, but she wasn’t sure how she felt about that because her sister Lisette used to say that making up stories meant you were a liar. In third grade, her teacher read one of Carmen’s stories to the class, and told them she wanted to publish it in the school newspaper.” Despite such an enthusiastic endorsement from her teacher, Carmen did not initially choose to become a writer. She studied and taught math and later became a computer programmer. After deciding to stay home with her children, Carmen felt the need to write. She took on the challenge of writing a story in her second language of English and submitted it to a Willamette Writers contest. When she found out she had won, Carmen determined that she would write for children with the hope of one day having her stories published in Spanish. We are pleased to welcome Carmen Bernier-Grand to the conference. She is presenting with Rosanne Parry on Saturday’s Session 3, 1:30-2:30.
We are all excited to enjoy the work and words of Kadir Nelson, most recently author-illustrator of the children’s biography Nelson Mandela, as well as Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans, and the award-winning We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball. In addition, his gorgeous oil paintings have illuminated other authors’ work, including Martin Luther King, Jr.’s illustrated I Have A Dream, Matt de la Pena’s A Nation’s Hope: The Story of Boxing Legend Joe Louis, and Carol Boston Weatherford’s Moses and Ellen Levine’s Henry’s Freedom Box for which he won a Caldecott Honor Medal. Nelson has garnered both the Coretta Scott King Illustrator and Author awards, a Sibert medal, the NAACP Image Award, the CASEY award for best baseball book, as well as having his fine art collected by major public and private institutions worldwide.
booksandbassets 