I heard from department chair Kathi Appelt yesterday that the other guest faculty who’ll be teaching with me at the Vermont College MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults in July will be Rita Williams-Garcia and Marc Aronson.

Norma Fox Mazer sent me a lovely welcoming note.

Wow!

I mean, really. Wow!

Cynsational News & Links

Author Kathi Appelt and illustrator Joy Fisher Hein on Miss Lady Bird’s Wildflowers: How A First Lady Changed America (HarperCollins, 2005).

Learning about Rita Williams-Garcia Compiled by: Susan Pais, Phyllis Brown, and Ann Gartner with Kay E. Vandergrift in Young Adult Literature.

Author Profile: Marc Aronson from teenreads.com.

Writers of books for children and young adults in Australia are treated as second-class citizens. Bean counters take note: a kid hooked on reading today becomes a major book buyer tomorrow. By Sonya Hartnett from The Bulletin. Thanks to Frances Hill, author of The Bug Cemetery, illustrated by Vera Rosenberry (Henry Holt, 2002), for suggesting this link.

Kindling Words by John Cech, an online audio interview from NPR. “Today, Susan Raab brings us this interview, recorded earlier this year, with Alison James and Harold Underdown, the coordinators of the annual Kindling Words conference for those working in the field of children’s book publishing.”

Interview with Sandra McLeod Humphrey, author of several nonfiction books for teens, from the “Secrets Of Success” column on author Ellen Jackson’s Web site.