I've been presenting all-day workshops that receive excellent evaluations from
participants since 2001. I was a public and school librarian for 17 years
and served as chairperson of the Newbery Award Committee. I have presented at conferences throughout the U.S. I wrote four guides to children's books, now out of print, including Great Books for Girls, for which I appeared on NBC’s Today Show.
I've given hundreds of workshops on young adult books and how
to use them with teens. I'm currently a seminar presenter for TTL
Seminars (Tools for
Teaching and Learning); I presented YA book seminars for BER for many years. For a decade, I was an instructor in Mansfield University’s on-line School Libraries and Information Technologies program in which I taught Children's & Young Adult Literature. I've also been an adjunct professor at the University of Rhode Island, where I taught young adult literature.
I was the chairperson of the Newbery Award Committee in 2001
as well as a member of an earlier Newbery Award Committee, Caldecott
Award Committee, Notable Children’s Books Committee, and Carnegie
Award Committee for videos. Before turning to writing and public
speaking, I worked as a children’s librarian for seventeen
years in schools and public libraries in California and Rhode Island.
Since 2013, I've been creating discussion guides and teacher's guides for publishers of children's and young adult books. The discussion guides offer questions for classrooms and book clubs. The teacher's guides include both discussion questions and classroom activities, sometimes with related websites and recommended additional reading.
I've been reviewing books for young
people in national publications since the early 1980s. I currently review for The Providence Journal. I previously reviewed for School Library Journal, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, and Teacher-Librarian. I was a contributing editor to Book magazine for five years.
I'm widely known for my four guides, now out of print: Great Books
for Girls: More than 600 Recommended Books for Girls Ages 3-14 (first published in 1997 and revised in May 2002), Great Books
for Boys: More than 600 Books for Boys 2 to 14 (Ballantine,
1998), Great Books about Things Kids Love: More than 750 Recommended
Books for Children 3 to 14 (Ballantine, 2002), and Great
Books for Babies and Toddlers: More than 500 Recommended Books for
Your Child’s First Three Years (Ballantine, 2003).
My books attracted national attention on television and radio,
and in newspapers and magazines. I've been featured on NBC’s
Today Show, All Things Considered, CNN, Fox News, Minneapolis
Public Radio, San Francisco’s KQED, and Parents’ Radio. My books have been featured and reviewed in the New York Times
Sunday Book Review, The Christian Science Monitor, US News and World
Report, USA Today, Ms., Newsday, Boston Globe, Denver Post, Dallas
Morning News, Business Week, Entertainment Weekly, and the Providence Journal,
among others. The guides sold more than 125,000 copies
A Minnesota native and current Rhode Island resident, I have a B.A. in English from Carleton College, Northfield, MN, and
an MLS and M.A. in Folklore from the University of California at
Berkeley. My folklore thesis on the lore of the stock market was
the subject of my first book, High Steppers, Fallen Angels,
and Lollipops: Wall Street Slang (Dodd, Mead, 1988).
