This link will take you to a list of Authors Guild member websites.

The Exquisite Conversation: An Adventure in Creating Books

The Cambridge Public Library and the National Children's Book and Literacy Alliance, in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, present The Exquisite Conversation: An Adventure In Creating Books, a discussion with celebrated authors and illustrators!

M.T. Anderson. Natalie Babbitt. Susan Cooper, Timothy Basil Ering. Steven Kellogg, Patricia MacLachlan. James Ransome, and the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, Katherine Paterson.

Date and Time: Saturday, December 3, 1:00 PM
Location: Kresge Auditorium at MIT, 48 Massachusetts Avenue

The event is for adults and children 10 and up. Parking is available at West Street Garage on Vassar Street. Books will be available for purchase and autographing from noon-1 PM. For more details, call 617-349-4409 or visit the Cambridge Public Library website.

Original artwork from The Exquisite Corpse created by Calef Brown, Timothy Basil Ering, Steven Kellogg, Chris Van Dusen and James Ransome is on display at the Main Library, 449 Broadway. Cambridge, until December 3.

Kudos

Congratulations! Ashley Bryan		Congratulations! Susan Cooper
Honorary board member Ashley Bryan won the 2011 Regina Medal for his enormous contributions to the world of literature for children. On his return from a CLNE sojourn in Greece, Ashley traveled directly to New Orleans to receive the award, presented on April 27, 2011. The Regina Medal honors individuals who best exemplify Walter de la Mare’s words, “only the rarest kind of best in anything can be good enough for the young.” Bravo, Ashley!!! He is also a recipient of the distinguished Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, a five-time Coretta Scott Award winner. His books include Let It Shine, All Things Bright and Beautiful, and It’s a Wonderful World, among many others. Complete information about the award.		Bravo, Susan Cooper, CLNE honorary board member, on the publication of The Magic Maker: A Portrait of John Langstaff and His Revels (release date October 11, 2011). Susan Cooper is the author of the acclaimed fantasy sequence The Dark Is Rising (including the Newbery Medal winner The Grey King); she is the coauthor of the Broadway play Foxfire and has won two Writers’ Guild Awards for television films. She was honored as a May Hill Arbuthnot lecturer “for her significant contribution to the field of children’s literature.”
Congratulations! Gregory Maguire		Congratulations! Tim Wynne-Jones
CLNE honorary director emeritus, received an honorary degree and delivered the 2011 commencement address at his alma mater, the State University of New York at Albany, where he challenged his audience “to try to imagine the impossible.” Like the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Gregory said that as a young graduate, he believed in imagining as many as six impossible things before breakfast. He urged his audience to do the same. “It’s my one simple piece of advice,” he said. “If it’s a goal, work for it. If it’s a snare and a distraction, work to avoid it, but you have to be able to imagine it first.” Be on the lookout for Greg’s new book OUT OF OZ: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years, scheduled to be at bookstores on November 1, 2011.		Tim Wynne-Jones, long-time CLNE friend, lecturer, and advisor, won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for fiction for Blink & Caution (Candlewick). In 1995 the Canadian author won the BGHB award for Some of the Kinder Planets and was an honoree in 2007 for Rex Zero and the End of the World. BGHB Awards will be presented on Friday, September 30, 2011 at a ceremony at Simmons College.” Complete press release.

Congratulations!
Virginia Euwer Wolff
From your CLNE FRIENDS!!!

Virginia Euwer Wolff Wins 2011 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – CONTACT: TERRI STUBBLEFIELD (405) 325-4531
NORMAN, OKLA., OCTOBER 25, 2010 – Virginia Euwer Wolff, the renowned U.S. author of young-adult literature, was announced Friday as the 2011 laureate of the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature. The NSK Prize is a $25,000 juried award sponsored by the University of Oklahoma and World Literature Today, OU’s award‐winning magazine of international literature and culture. “Virginia Euwer Wolff’s thoughtful fiction has delighted children the world over. Also a writer’s writer who commands the respect of her peers, she deeply deserves the recognition of the prestigious NSK Neustadt Prize,” said Robert Con Davis‐Undiano, executive director of World Literature Today. The announcement was made at a banquet awarding Chinese poet Duo Duo the 2010 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, at which Davis-Undiano also paid tribute to Walter Neustadt Jr. (1919-2010) for his legendary generosity to the university and WLT.

The other nominees for the 2011 NSK Prize included Christopher Paul Curtis, Anne Fine, Mordicai Gerstein, David Macaulay, Brian Selznick, and Jacqueline Woodson. Suzanne Fisher Staples, the juror who nominated Wolff for the award, noted that “Wolff has a level of excellence in her use of pitch-perfect language, form, and imagery that is unique and fitting to each story, [in] novels that move readers with the grace of acceptance and forgiveness, the luminosity of hope.” In announcing Wolff as the winner of the prize, Nancy Barcelo, one of the three Neustadt sisters who endowed the NSK Prize, commented: “If you ever want to connect or reconnect with what it was like to view the world with a child’s sense of wonder, just read one of Virginia Euwer Wolff’s books.” Her sister Kathy Neustadt likewise noted that choosing Wolff “also speaks to the caliber of the jurors.” In addition to Staples, the other members of the 2011 jury included Tobin Anderson, Rita Auerbach, Adèle Geras, Seth Lerer, Eva Mitnick, Jim Murphy, and Masha Rudman. The jury made special mention of Wolff’s novel True Believer (2001).

Virginia Euwer Wolff was born in 1937 in Oregon. After graduating from Smith College, she taught school, reared two children, and attended graduate school in four states before beginning to write for young readers in her mid-forties. Her novels focus on a learning-disabled sixteen-year-old boy (Probably Still Nick Swansen, 1988); twelve-year-old violinist Allegra Leah Shapiro (The Mozart Season, 1991); two sixth-grade softball teams in 1949 (Bat 6, 1998); and an unmarried teen mother, her two children, and their babysitter (Make Lemonade, 1993; True Believer, 2001; and This Full House, 2009). Wolff has won the National Book Award, the Jane Addams Peace Award and Honor, two Golden Kites, the Michael L. Printz Honor, and two Oregon Book Awards. She has lived in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., but now reads, writes, and plays chamber music in Oregon.

The NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature was established by Nancy Barcelo, Susan Neustadt Schwartz, and Kathy Neustadt to encourage high-quality writing for children by honoring an accomplished contemporary writer or illustrator of children’s literature. The three sisters are members of a pioneer Oklahoma family whose support of the University of Oklahoma spans more than a half‐century. Their grandmother, Doris Westheimer Neustadt, provided the endowment for the world-renowned Neustadt International Prize for Literature, also awarded by World Literature Today, which is widely considered to be the “American Nobel” and one of the most prestigious international literary prizes. Their parents, Walter Jr. and Dolores Neustadt, established an endowed chair, the Neustadt Professor of Comparative Literature, to enhance the directorship of World Literature Today.

This is the fifth NSK Prize to be awarded, following Mildred D. Taylor (2003), Brian Doyle (2005), Katherine Paterson (2007), and Vera B. Williams (2009). Wolff will be presented the $25,000 prize, a silver medallion, and a certificate during official ceremonies at the University of Oklahoma in fall 2011.
For additional information, contact TERRI STUBBLEFIELD (405) 325-4531; info about the award at http://www.ou.edu/worldlit/NSK.html

We've made every effort to contact past CLNE speakers and leaders, and what follows is what we were able to glean before going to website press. Please do keep in touch with your news; write Gregory Maguire at gmwriter@aol.com We'll try to update this page several times a year.

CLNE Keepsake

The Examined Life Program

Barbara Harrison writes:

I'm directing THE EXAMINED LIFE: GREEK STUDIES IN THE SCHOOLS (ExL), a professional program for educators (teachers librarians, et al), aimed at strengthening the study of Greece in the schools of the nation. Like CLNE, ExL hopes to raise public consciousness and knowledge of a subject vital to our understanding of ourselves and our times. Participants study Greek literature, history, philosophy, art, and the impact of Greece on American ideals and culture. Like CLNE, too, ExL is a literature based program, highlighting Greek mythology, and the epic poems, tragedies, comedies, histories, and works of the philosophers. Through web casting and video conferencing, we hope to make the program available to CLNE friends and colleagues across the nation.

Please take a look at the website at http://www.teachgreece.org and don't hesitate to be in touch with me at Ithaka07@comcast.net or with Connie Carven at Connie_Carven@newton.K12.ma.us.