A Publication of Humanities Tennessee

Children & YA

Charlotte, Sixty Years Later

By Margaret Renkl

April 23, 2012 Michael Sims is a curious—but not a nosy—biographer, as Chapter 16‘s Serenity Gerbman pointed out in her review of Sims’s bestselling 2011 book, The Story of Charlotte’s Web: “White was famously reclusive and—strange as it may seem for a biographer—Sims understands and respects that need for privacy. Allowing White’s words and experiences to speak for themselves, he offers readers a deeper understanding not only of the life and mind that created Charlotte’s Web, but of the creative process that led to the book and of the sheer work it entailed. The Story of Charlotte’s Web is quite literally that: a biography of the book itself. How did it come to be? What forces and experiences throughout White’s life shaped him and converged to bring his timeless classic into being?”

Setting Out for the Promised Land

By Tina LoTufo

April 3, 2012 On February 1, 1968, Echol Cole and Robert Walker were crushed to death when a loose shovel fell into the mechanism of the garbage truck in which they were riding. Eleven days later, nearly one thousand sanitation, sewer, and roadway workers in Memphis began a city-wide strike for safer and more humane working conditions, higher and more consistent wages, and the right to have a voice in their own treatment. Two months after that, Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated on a motel balcony. Marching to the Mountaintop, Ann Bausum’s careful and thorough portrayal of this pivotal period, shows young readers how one event can set in motion forces powerful enough to change a city, a state, a nation—and maybe even the history of the world. Bausum will appear in Memphis at The Booksellers at Laurelwood on April 5 at 6 p.m.

Shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, Celebrated by an Entire Homeland

By Margaret Renkl

March 30, 2012 Between Shades of Gray, the bestselling debut young-adult novel by Nashvillian Ruta Sepetys, has already won the Golden Kite Award (an honor by the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and the Prix RTL-Lire (a French prize for the best novel for young people). It was also a finalist for the American Library Association’s William C. Morris Award. Now Shades of Gray has been shortlisted for a prestigious Carnegie Medal, and Sepetys has been honored with Lithuania’s Patriot Award.

Sepetys's Golden Kite

By Serenity Gerbman

March 9, 2012 Nashvillian Ruta Sepetys has won the Golden Kite Award for Fiction from the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Ilustrators (SCBWI), another prestigious honor for her acclaimed debut young-adult novel Between Shades of Gray. Sepetys will be given the award, along with a $2,500 cash prize, at the organization’s annual meeting in August.

What a Poem Leaves Out

By Pablo Tanguay

February 15, 2012 Marvin Bell has written twenty-three books of poems and taught for more than forty years at The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but he is hardly slowing down. In 2011 alone, he published a new book of poems (Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems), a children’s book (A Primer about the Flag), and a collaboration with the photographer Nathan Lyons (Whiteout). He also frequently performs his poems with musicians, including jazz bassist Glen Moore and his own son, the Tennessee-based singer/songwriter Nathan Bell. Marvin Bell will read from his work on February 20 at 4:30 p.m. in the Tom Jackson Building on the campus of Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. The event is free and open to the public.

What a Poem Leaves Out

Our Own True Selves

By Tina LoTufo

February 9, 2012 Same Sun Here, a new middle-grade novel by Silas House and Neela Vaswani, examines what happens when people find a way to overcome social barriers and make a real connection to another person—no matter how “other” the other may seem. In the process, the authors suggest, they might find that the things which unite them—love for family, dreams for the future, and a belief in the necessity of justice and compassion for all—are greater than the circumstances which separate them.

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