This dynamic poet never has to look any further than her own backyard for inspiration. April is a wondrous month for poetry. Alice Schertle was born in April and Young People's Poetry Week is celebrated from the 11th through the 17th this year. Kristine O'Connell George was born on May 6, 1954, in Denver, CO. She is a great admirer of teachers;…

Growing up in Flemington, New Jersey, put Jen Bryant in the heart of the lore behind the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. Family stories of the events of the day and extensive research led to "The Trial," a novel in verse. The first several parts of this novel are included here.

Jack Gantos, an author who has 37 books to his credits with "Rotten Ralph", "Joey Pigza" and "Hole in My Life" being the widely acclaimed ones, describes how he set about righting his transgression from the dire life as an inmate to his dream of becoming an author. Gantos states that the true function of a writer is to write a masterpiece and no…

Efforts made by Leslie Marmon Silko's who took factual raw materials and, through the alchemy of her creative artistry, transformed her novel, "Ceremony" into something new and different is presented. Silko has made certain changes in the Bataan Death March in "Ceremony", and portrayed the Japanese with considerable sympathy.

Sequels are written by the authors due to some financial reasons and sold by the publishers because readers request them. The readers admire the characters mentioned in the sequels, an attachment is developed for these characters and hence a curiosity is developed to know more about them.

Sociological production is a situated and embodied activity carried out by individuals inserted in actual social relations. Considering that this feature has an influence upon the content of scholarly literature and that it can be revealed in the scientific text itself, I propound a new interpretation of the writing process of Robert E. Park's…

Dark is the word often used to describe the subject matter of Carolyn Coman's novels. Edgy, harrowing, gritty and difficult are other adjectives that reviewers and readers--and Coman herself--have used in reference to the topics undertaken by this esteemed writer of young-adult fiction. This past July, while both were teaching at the Writers…

Chris Crowe, a university professor and author of young adult novels, sits with Lesesne to discuss his writing of both Mississippi Trial, 1955 (fiction) and Getting Away with Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Murder Case (nonfiction), related books that tell the story of a murder case that speaks to us from a half-century ago. Detailing…

The believable voices of Judy Blume's characters--such as the troublemaking Fudge from "Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing" and freckle-less Andrew from "Freckle Juice"--have charmed readers since Blume published her first book, "The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo," in 1969. This article presents an interview with author Judy Blume. In this…

This study is based on 72 children's and young adult books that met the criteria of being about Muslims and published and circulated here in the U.S. They can be divided into the varied genres as 49 contemporary realistic fiction, 6 historical fiction, and 17 autobiographies, biographies, and memoirs. In-depth reading and coding were used to…

In this article, the author gives some ideas on how to find funding for author and poet visits. Author and poet visits are very important for children of all ages. Young children learn much from meeting real people who write professionally. Good speakers inspire students to write and communicate in an articulate manner while in school and later in…

In "The Name of the Rose," Umberto Eco essentially presents an educative vision of some basic semiotic principles that infuse the textual form of a popular fictional genre--the detective story. In effect, it characterizes the postmodernization of the traditional "whodunnit" moving the genre from the realm of "the real" or the plausible into the…

This article chronicles the experience of two writers working in digital technologies to write fiction. One writer, the author of the article, describes how her experience writing with the software "Storyspace" influenced her writing of print fiction, changing her processes and challenging her notions of genre. The other writer, a 16-year-old…

The author, an English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teacher, believes that for stories to be a successful tool in classroom instruction, they need to have universal themes, and they must deal with situations that the students could readily identify with regardless of their language, culture, or religion. In this article, she introduces the unknown…

Universities and colleges of business have experienced evolving missions and accreditation pressures that have increased the emphasis on the scholarly endeavors of the faculty. In this article, the authors reviewed 6 major representative business journals for the periods 1970-1972, 1980-1982, 1990-1992, and 2000-2002. During this period, all…