Speakers

Eric Rohmann, “Back to Normal” at ISU, 6:30 p.m., Friday June 13

Eric Rohmann earned his BA from Illinois State University in 1980 and his MS in 1985.  His book My Friend Rabbit received the 2003 Randolph Caldecott Medal.  My Friend Rabbit also was honored as an American Library Association Notable Book and a New York Times Best Book for Young Readers. In 1995 Rohmann received a Caldecott Honor award for his wordless picture book Time Flies. He is the author-illustrator of The Cinder Eyed Cats and Pumpkinhead.  Rohmann delivered the Lois Lenski Children’s Literature Lecture at Illinois State University in 2002.

For more information on Eric Rohmann, visit Random House.

 

 

 

 

Betsy Hearne, Francelia Butler Lecture, 2:00 p.m., Saturday, June 14

Betsy Hearne is Professor Emerita at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she taught children’s literature, folklore, and storytelling for many years. Hearne is the author of numerous books and articles about children’s literature, as well as picture books and fiction for young people, most recently Hauntings: Tales of Danger, Love, and Sometimes Loss (2007).  She has co-edited with Roberta Seelinger Trites A Narrative Compass: Women’s Scholarly Journeys (in press, 2008).

The title of Professor Hearne's Francelia Butler Lecture is "Researching and ReImagining Folklore in Children's Literature."

For more information on Betsy Hearne, visit the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

 

 

 

Janice N. Harrington, "Chasing After Stories," 11 a.m., Thursday, June 12

Janice N. Harrington is an award-winning children’s author and poet. Her latest children’s picture book, The Chicken Chasing Queen of Lamar County (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) appeared in March 2007. Her previous picture book, Going North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), won the Ezra Jack Keats Award from the New York Public Library as well as many other awards and citations. Her first book of poetry, Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (2007), is the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions, a leading publisher of American poetry. She is also the winner of a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Poetry. For many years, she worked as a professional storyteller, telling stories at festivals around the country, including the National Storytelling Festival. Formerly the Coordinator of Youth Services at the Champaign Public Library in Champaign, Illinois, she teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She will be reading selections from her own work.

For more information on Janice Harrington, visit BOA Editions.

 

 

 

Peter Dickinson: Phoenix Award winner, 6:30 p.m., Saturday, June 14

Peter Dickinson was born in Africa in 1927 and grew up in England.  He is the author of numerous children’s books that have received a broad range of awards, including the Whitbread Award, the Michael L. Printz Award, and the Mythopoeic Society Fantasy Award.  He has been shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and won the 2001 Phoenix Award for The Seventh Raven.  Peter Dickinson’s Eva is the winner of the 2008 Phoenix Award, an award given annually by the Children’s Literature Association to honor a book that did not receive its due when it was originally published twenty years earlier.  Mr. Dickinson will receive the award at the 2008 ChLA banquet, where he will also give an acceptance speech.

For more information on Peter Dickinson, visit his official Web site.