Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Presentation: 6:30 p.m., Room 108, Main Library

Reception and Book Signing: 7:30 p.m., Grand Reading Room, Main Library

Sponsored by EKU Libraries and the College of Education

Susan Campbell Bartoletti Bio

A former 8th grade English teacher with eighteen years classroom experience, Susan Campbell Bartoletti is an award-winning author of picture books, novels, and nonfiction. Her most recent nonfiction book, Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow, won both a Sibert Informational Book Honor and a Newbery Honor award in 2006.  The Newbery committee praised this book for “elevat[ing] understanding of Hitler's strategic plans of manipulation to a new level and offer[ing] contemporary youth the opportunity to question the choices they might have made in the same situation."

Ms. Bartoletti’s years in the classroom continue to inform and inspire her writing for young people. “My students helped me find my audience,” she says in an interview quoted at scholastic.com." They have clearly enriched my work and helped me see that everyday, ordinary kids are living extraordinary lives." And on her own website, she writes, “Today it's impossible for me to separate my love of teaching from my love of writing and books.”

Her other nonfiction works include Growing Up in Coal Country (1996), Kids on Strike! (1999), and Black Potatoes: The Story of the Great Irish Famine 1845-1850, which won the Sibert Medal in 2002.  Her novels include A Coal Miner’s Bride: The Diary of Anetka Kaminska, 1896 (2000), No Man’s Land: A Young Soldier’s Story (1999), and The Journal of Finn Reardon, Newsie, New York City, 1899 (2003).  Her most recent book is The Boy Who Dared (2008), a powerful work of historical fiction based on the real-life story of one of the teenagers profiled in Hitler Youth.

Podcast Interview with Susan Bartoletti: streaming | podcast. (The playback of these files requires the latest version of Windows Media Player, and a broadband connection.)