Up Close and Personal: Hosting Diverse Authors

Introduction

Author study is a frequent feature in children’s literature courses and in K-12 classrooms (Kennedy, 2012). The study of an author’s body of work allows readers to find patterns through familiar themes, characters, or settings across an author’s work. These studies often include learning about the author’s life as well as their craft. Learning about an author as a person serves to humanize the author and the work of the author. The inclusion of authors who are Black, Indigenous or People of Color (BIPOC) has the additional benefit of expanding the reader’s conception of who does the work of writing, where their ideas come from, and the variety of experiences found in literature. These studies may be enlarged by videos of the author or through other opportunities to hear them speak. Opportunities to interact with authors in real time can provide a deeper engagement with the author as well as excitement about their writing. This chapter explores the value of planning an author visit as an authentic means to learn about diverse authors and their work. In a literature course at the university level, the traditional author study might be replaced with the project described in this chapter, which has real-world application.

This chapter focuses on planning a school-wide, one-day visit for an author, author-illustrator, or illustrator visit. In this chapter, “author” is used to refer to an author, author-illustrator, or illustrator. Visits from book illustrators have many of the same benefits as an author visit. They may inspire different students to get excited about books and reading. Illustrators will often draw as part of their presentation, or even draw something for individual students as they autograph books. Creators of graphic novels may also be popular choices (Tamaki et al., 2015).

An author visit is a huge undertaking for schools. As a school librarian for over fifteen years, I have experience with planning and hosting author visits. I was fortunate early in my career to share the planning and preparation for an author visit with several more experienced and knowledgeable school librarians. I hope my experience will provide similar inspiration and support to future educators and the university educators who teach courses in children’s literature. Exposure to the planning elements for such an event during pre-service education allows future teachers and librarians to learn about an author or illustrator and think through the steps of hosting an author visit. Students could carry this assignment forward to their classrooms or libraries to plan an author visit or to write a grant to fund a visit. While the focus of this chapter is planning for a school visit, the advice in this chapter might also be used by university educators to guide the planning and implementation of an author visit for a course. An instructor might work with community partners including libraries, bookstores, schools and/or universities to bring such experiences to their students and the community. Community partnerships such as this lend themselves to funding applications to both internal university grants and external, national grant solicitations.

There are other models for author visits that allow students to meet or work with an author in a small group or workshop. Hand (2006), a librarian, talks about moving away from an assembly format to having smaller workshop events with students and reports these had longer lasting impacts on students. A multi-day visit with master classes connected to the research process rather than specific curricula allowed students to engage in a deep dive into the process of research and writing with impacts on achievement including test scores. Another model (Varsalona, 2006) is to host a student authors conference where students write to compete for slots where they can get to meet and work with an author. Both of these models have a lot to offer but may be more costly and exclusive. This chapter will focus on the one-day, whole school author visit as a means to connect the most students with the event.