Simone de Beauvoir, best known outside France as a leading modern feminist theorist, is also recognized as a writer of literature, philosophy, and drama. In this essay, James D. Marshall aims to present Beauvoir, not as a mere entry in the history of French philosophy, nor as an under-laborer to Jean-Paul Sartre, but as someone who has important…

It is known that for Louise Erdrich the "old language" is Ojibwe, sometimes called Anishinaabe or Ojibwemowin, a language that is still spoken, but that, like most Native American languages, is losing ground to English or, more rarely, Spanish. Erdrich has been learning the Ojibwe language for some years, and she is increasingly macaronic in her…

Romain Gary was born in Lithuania, moved to France at age 14, and spent much of his adult life in Britain and America. He represents an unusually extreme case of multiple identity in a transnational context. Despite this, Gary's literary oeuvre is not much concerned with the problem of identity. It exhibits instead a tension between protest at the…

In this article, the author profiles Nancy Poydar, a former sixth-grade teacher who, during her 14 years of teaching, found herself fascinated by the daily mini-dramas that often play out in classrooms. Drawing on this experience, Poydar made a career change, first as an illustrator of children's books, and now as author of almost 30 children's…

The author suggests that models positioning the multilingual writer as passively conditioned by "interference" from his or her first language, as well as more correlative models of the interrelationships of multiple languages in writing, need to be revised. Analyzing works written to different audiences, in different contexts, and in…

This article takes a look at WritersCorps, a program that aims to provide opportunities for youth to discover, develop, and share their writing. The program's success depends on contracting with teaching artists who have the skills, knowledge, and heart to encourage youth to write well. All its teachers are published writers, active community…

This book is an introduction to the literature and art of American writer N. Scott Momaday, winner of the 1969 Pulitzer Prize and member of the Kiowa American Indian Tribe. The book describes the impact of Momaday's family, Kiowa heritage, Pueblo cultural experiences, and academic preparation on his worldview, poetry, novels, essays, children's…

This article is a discussion of authors and controversial novels that should be on the top of library media specialists' reading list if they work with high-school-age teens. "Controversial" is not a dirty word, it is an enticement! The goal of library media specialists is to get teens who may be burned out with reading due to incentive programs…

In this article, the author discusses how her sixth-grade students gained writing skills and learned to "dream big dreams." She wanted to celebrate literacy, and also create something that could raise funds to support literacy projects, so she challenged her students to write to their favorite authors and ask each for a recipe. The end result of…

This article presents two interview strategies used to assess college students' developmental growth toward self-authorship. We illustrate that self-authorship is a foundation for achieving many college learning outcomes and argue that designing practice to promote self-authorship requires understanding how to assess it. We offer a brief overview…

Background: It is widely believed that there are reciprocal links between reading achievement and reading exposure: children who read more do better at reading, and reading achievement itself promotes reading. We tested the hypotheses that these links arise because children's genetically influenced reading performance is correlated with their…

In Leslie Marmon Silko's 1977 novel "Ceremony" the "primacy of the geographical" has often been interpreted as a particularly holistic and healing sense of place--what the critic Robert M. Nelson has characterized as the "spirit of place." This heightened awareness of the spiritual and redemptive power of the natural and the imaginative in…

This document is a step-by-step guide for librarians who wish to host children's authors and illustrators at school and public libraries. Topics include reasons for having an author/illustrator visit; preliminary planning and making proposals; making initial contacts; the program plan, including types of events, examples of successful visits and…

This theme issue features 11 articles on the research interests of Indiana University faculty whose work on various campuses continues to advance knowledge about creative writing. Articles in this issue are "Creative Writing and the Future" (Roger Mitchell) which outlines the historical beginnings of the intellectual disciplines of…

Scholars of Israeli children's literature have recently noticed an interesting socio-literary phenomenon: the emergence of an entirely new branch in Israeli children's literature, namely ultra-orthodox children's literature. The books belonging to this special category are easily distinguished from "regular" Israeli children's books by…