Michelle Martin, author of Brown Gold: Milestones-of African American Picture Books, 1845-2002, will present the 21st annual Lois Lenski Children’s Literature Lecture.
The talk, titled Black Childhood Abroad: Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps’s Popo and Fifina, will be at 7 p.m. Monday, March 3, at Schroeder Hall, room 130. Sponsored by Milner Library and the Department of English, the event is free and open to the public.
An alumna of Illinois State’s English Studies Program, Martin holds the Augusta Baker Endowed Chair in Childhood Literacy at the University of South Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science.
Along with her research on African-American picture books, Martin is co-editor of Sexual Pedagogies: Sex Education in Britain, Australia, and America, 1879-2000. She has served as the president of the Children’s Literature Association, and is working on a book-length project that examines the works for young people written by Harlem Renaissance authors Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes.
The Lenski Lecture is named for Newbery-award winning children’s author Lois Lenski, who generously donated a portion of her papers to Milner Library before her death in 1974. The Lenski Lecture is the longest-running children’s literature lecture to focus on literary criticism in the United States.
