Children S Authors

"Ah, snug lie those that slumber Beneath Conviction’s roof. Their floors are sturdy lumber, Their windows weatherproof. But I sleep cold forever, And cold sleep all my kind, For I was born to shiver In the draft from an open mind."

"Men may be allowed romanticism; women, who can create life in their own bodies, dare not indulge in it."

"Housewives more than any other race deserve well-furnished minds. They have to live in them such a lot of the time. ... We who belong to that profession hold the fate of the world in our hands."

"Eve, smiling, plucked the apple, then Laughed, sighed—and tasted it again: "Strange such a pleasant, juicy thing On a forbidden tree should spring!"But had she seen with clearer eyes, Or had the serpent been less wise, She'd scarce have shown such little wit As to let Adam taste of it!"

"Bart [burning books]: So long, Johnny Tremain. Your Newberry award won't save you now!"

"Hundreds would die, but not the thing they died for. A man can stand up."

"How old are you, Johnny?" she asked. "Sixteen." "And what's that — a boy or a man?" He laughed. "A boy in time of peace and a man in time of war."

"Marge: It's about a boy who goes to war. His hand is deformed in an accident. Bart: Deformed? Why didn't you say so? They should call this book Johnny Deformed."

"Human relations never seem to stand completely still. This apple, for instance. It might ripen into something better than it now was, or, unromantically, it might rot away in his pocket."

"We give all we have, lives, property, safety, skills ... we fight, we die, for a simple thing. Only that a man can stand up."

"A man can stand up to anything with a good weapon in his hands. Without it, he's but a dumb beast."

"He had never in all his life slept in a bed alone — much less a whole room."

"I knew he could learn — if he didn't get killed first. It was sink or swim for him — and happens he's swimming."

"Then Johnny saw running down Cambridge road through the bushes on Charlestown Common a scurry of red ants. ... Those red ants were British soldiers. ... You could see the flash of musket fire, too far away to be heard. Fireflies swarming, hardly more than that."

"After that Johnny began to watch himself. For the first time he learned to think before he spoke."

"If he still were in England and were the man whom this girl loved, she would probably seek him out — women have almost a genius for anticlimaxes."

"Most American heroes of the Revolutionary period are by now two men, the actual man and the romantic image. Some are even three men—the actual man, the image, and the debunked remains."

"Just like the sun coming up yonder out of the sea, pushing rays of light ahead of it."

"On rocky islands gulls woke."

"The editor is seated with a countrywoman at the door of her cottage in an isolated place. Three young girls on their way to a dance come along. They adjust their head-shawls, showing off a little. "They are pretty girls," the editor says to the householder. "If they were hanged for their beauty, they'd die innocent," is her reply. This is a real piece of wit. She did not want to contradict one who is her guest. He has shown, however, that his standard of beauty leaves something to be desired. Her judgment of the beauty under consideration is reasonable, but the expression of it is imaginative. When one puts imagination at the service of criticism, the result is apt to be a piece of malice, and Irish wit is often malicious. An illustration in a Dublin journal shows two farmers seated on a boundary fence. "I don't see a gap in the moon tonight," one says; and the other answers, "If you did you could let your cows in through it." This strikes at the farmer who would save forage by letting his cows into his neighbor's field through a gapped fence."

"The speech of the Irish country-people is fine material for the dramatist, and the Irish dramatists have made good use of it. 's dialogue reproduces the energy and the extravagance of the people's speech— ..."

"... a devout man with a great love of the earth. He has also a fine sense of the traditional ballad."

"Ireland is a country that has two literatures—one a literature in ——that has been cultivated continuously since the eighth century, and the other a literature in English—Anglo-Irish literature—that took its rise in the eighteenth century. Anglo-Irish literature begins, as an English critic has observed, with Goldsmith and Sheridan humming some urban song as they stroll down an English laneway. That is, it begins chronically in that way. At the time when Goldsmith and Sheridan might be supposed to be strolling down English laneways, Ireland, for all but a fraction of the people, was a Gaelic-speaking country with a poetry that had many centuries of cultivation."

"I don’t dwell on regrets. There are many things in my life I could, with hindsight, have done differently but I don’t regret them. The mistakes have contributed to who and where I am today."

"In stories I look for originality. I am also big on characters. A story that has me thinking about a character or characters long after I have turned the last page works for me."

"Write your heart out and persevere, persevere, persevere!"

"My advice to all writers is focus and invest time in your writing ...At the end of the day, it is your writing. It is your story and you have to take responsibility for it and not rely or expect help from anyone."

"I grew up in Zambia surrounded by books but I was not much of a reader. I did however talk a lot and tell a lot of stories as a child. I think it was this passion for telling stories that eventually translated into writing much later in my life."

"Writing is very subjective. It is also solitary. My advice to all writers is focus and invest time in your writing. Do your homework in terms of submitting manuscripts to the right publishers etc. At the end of the day, it is your writing. It is your story and you have to take responsibility for it and not rely or expect help from anyone."

""Enough people in the world trying to silence us. Girl, you better speak up.” (p238)"

"That was how I knew Sister Mukumbo was a real teacher, aside from her welcoming smile and her blackboard penmanship. She asked a teacher's type of question. The kind that says: Join in. (p71)"

"I enjoyed the sound of our voices following one another. Sounded like a favorite song from the radio they no longer play, so when you hear it, you remember how things were. (p144)"

""If you knew what I knew, seen what I've seen, you wouldn't be so quick to pull the plow." (p110)"

"It was a strange, wonderful feeling. To discover eyes upon you when you expected no one to notice you at all. (p214)"

"Children were a big part of the Black Panther Movement. At that time there were no books about the roles children played in the movement so I thought I should write a story that focused on children. I was also in awe of the women in the movement, like Angela Davis, Elaine Brown, Kathleen Cleaver and many more. They were strong and intelligent women who fought racism and sexism mainly through their words. (FAQ)"

"(Do you consider yourself a pioneer?) RWG: Our pioneers are Kristen Hunter, Alice Childress, Rosa Guy, Joyce Hansen, Mildred Taylor, Joyce Carol Thomas, Brenda Wilkinson, Virginia Hamilton, [[Julius Lester, and Walter Dean Myers. Manchild in the Promised Land is our Catcher in the Rye. These are our pioneers, while those still with us remain quite a force in young adult literature after thirty and forty years of publishing. (2008)"

"(What have you seen change positively and negatively since that time especially in Af Am [African American] children’s literature?) RWG: The biggest change is being able to find African American lit for children and young people in libraries and bookstores. We’re here. We’re out on the shelves with our diverse stories. Characters don’t bear the weight of having to represent all African-Americans, or of meeting publishers’ black quota for the year. We have a presence, yet there’s still a need for even more stories and more writers to explore different genres. If you would have asked me twenty years ago about negativity in African American literature for young people, my lips would still be flapping. I would have begun with them not letting us tell our stories as we know them, and how they let people outside the race and culture write whatever they wanted and call it an African American story. That was one of my main gripes. “Why can’t I tell a story I know to be true, but ‘she’ can write this fake mess?” Ahem. I’ve calmed down over the years. My view has broadened as writing from the other side has gotten better. Truer. More and more I see that we are not a people unto our selves. We make up a good deal of the American experience, culture and expression. I feel both loss and gain. This is the way of forward movement. (2008)"

"Ultimately, it’s the reader’s book. It’s about what they receive and how they interpret it. (2008)"

"(How do you tackle writer’s block?) I box, knit, write, and read. Physicality helps to jar me out of my mental state. It shakes things free. (2017)"

"writing is an art but it’s work. If you don’t value your work, who will? (2021)"

"I’ve addressed topics like teen pregnancy, abortion, school violence, rape, and abuse. But I think in each and every book, with the exception of No Laughter Here, the real story is the characters’ struggle with themselves. It’s always self-struggle, and no matter how intense the other subject matter, I don’t like to take that away from the character. I believe with every story there’s something within the main character that must be realized, and I like to give them the power to do that. (2015)"

"My intention is that the more humanity we see, the better we can judge, acknowledge, understand and even indict. There is the horror, and there is also the hope. I wouldn’t be here if not for the people who endured but also loved. I want to pass that on to the reader. (2021)"

"(In a note included with advance editions of the book, referring to slavery and its legacies, you wrote, “At no other time in our nation’s history have readers sought out more this examination and conversation.” Why do you think now is a particularly important moment for this reflection?) RWG: I’ve revised this answer 10 times. I have been watching the trial of the police officer charged with the murder of George Floyd. I have become that boy who asked, “Why do they hate us?” And then I have my answer and I get angry. I’m a person in my 60s who sees the present as a cycle. We fight for rights because we experience inequities and brutalities, we get rights, we move forward, and then we repeat the cycle. What is happening—the murder of and violence against people of color, the suppression of rights, the unequal access to health care—is not new. It’s part of the cycle. We need to talk openly about what is happening to people because of their race, ethnicity and gender, because the cycle continues. We see it happening before our eyes daily. Each and every one of us has to become the conscience of this country by what we say and do. People are being killed or brutalized on the basis of simply existing. We are not too far from our enslaved ancestors. We have to speak up and act up when the unconscionable is normalized. But we have to talk before there can be any reparations. We have to be unafraid to have uncomfortable conversations with an emphasis on listening. (2021)"

"[asked what readers can expect from her book] Surprises and to challenge our own ideas of humanity. Novels are the home for irony, paradox, contradiction—all the things that make humans interesting to read and write about. (2021)"

"(What do you like to tell students when you talk to them?) RWG: I think what I enjoy most about going to schools is showing kids who I am. I’m still just kind of a big, silly kid, and I can’t hide it. I want children to see that they don’t have to let go of who they are, and I want them to understand that it’s okay to be goofy, to let go of the cool stuff. The main thing is that they be themselves and celebrate themselves, and let people know them as they truly are. (2015)"

"(What advice do you have for aspiring writers?) Write a little bit every day. I began by writing 500 words a day, but I think 25-100 words a day, every day will help a beginning writer gain confidence and a flow of thoughts and writing. Read widely! Be adventurous with your reading. Nothing helps writing like having the sound of good writing in your mind’s ear. Try new things. New foods. Visit new places. Then write about your experiences. (FAQ)"

"One of the things I remember about the late 1960s was not only the emergence of the Black Panther Party, but the fact that there were kids who were involved. There were kids being served breakfasts, kids who were shown on the news holding signs, kids who attended rallies, and so on. This awareness of kids my age being a part of those things is what inspired my approach to One Crazy Summer."

"She is best known as the author of prizewinning children’s books (her only book for grown-ups, until now, is the slim and slyly titled “Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise”). While she keeps one foot in the academic world as a fellow of , she has the other planted elsewhere, engaging in and — as good a preparation as any for rendering Donne’s precarious life."

"… I write about s, because it was probably a hermit crab who ate . And I write about s, because there was once a ."

"I come from a family of pilots. Both my grandfathers flew s in the Second World War, and my uncle can fly a plane. And, so, about five years ago, I started learning for the huge pleasure of being above the world and being given a vision of the sweep of it."