Blog

Check out my guest blog post at "Literacy in Place," a website about rural literacy and literature for youth.

Here are the first two paragraphs to get you started:

I was back in Cook County Jail after a two-year pandemic hiatus. Liz—my GA—and I were sitting in the mini-auditorium-turned-classroom waiting for the eleven incarcerated men to be brought to us. We had arranged the chairs in a tight circle—thirteen this week. Next week it would be twenty-three when the DePaul students joined us. This day, Liz and I were there to introduce ourselves and prepare the men for my Inside-Out university course, “Deconstructing the School to Prison Pipeline.” For...

A couple of weeks ago I rolled out Kid America’s cover for everyone to see. Well, it’s changed a bit. Take a look and guess how it has changed. Below is the first reveal. At the top is the latest and final one.

Yep, the difference is obvious. Aimé, KA’s Production Director, and I discussed the cover quite a bit after the first reveal. She pushed for a color scheme that would better represent the novel’s themes. I tend to let things be, but she wanted to make sure it captured...

In 2016, I couldn’t fathom a Trump presidency. When it happened, I found relief in Clinton winning the popular vote by two million. The outcome, I thought, was more a product of an archaic electoral system than a reflection of national disposition. That changed on November 5, 2024. Trump won the popular vote, drawing votes from demographic groups across the board and picking up support in nearly every part of the country. All this was done as he stumbled, fumbled, fumed, blustered, and...

There are people in our lives whose influence is significant but fleeting. They’re there one moment, often at an opportune one, then they’re gone. Their presence and absence are a sequitur to something more lasting.

Coach Jim Petty was one of those people for me.

I read the news of his disappearance on Facebook. A FB friend had posted a link. Coach Petty’s truck, swept away by “swift-moving water,” was gone, with him in it. It wouldn’t be found for another week. He was still in it, submerged...

I’m not sure when I read Raymond Carver for the first time. I know he was he was still alive. I looked forward to new stories in Esquire and The New Yorker. Then he died of lung cancer. He was only fifty. I suspect he lived as his protagonists did—antsy, struggling, hoping for a break, smoking and drinking heavily, life never what they wanted.

I was twenty-seven when Carver died. By the time I turned thirty I had read all his stories, many two or three times. I tried reading Carver’s poetry...

In a few months, I’ll be sixty-five years old. There are some days I feel it more than others. Those days are becoming more common. Among some of the old-age changes in me I’ve notice are I’m slower and less energetic than I once was. I’m also less bothered or concerned about things of little or no consequence. I wouldn’t call it apathy but more like ambivalence. Or maybe it’s more readily recognizing what’s consequential and what is not. The list of what is not grows larger.

While the...

I got through high school reading what was assigned with little thought of why. Not that I read much before then. Middle school is a blank. I don’t remember anything I read. Elementary? I remember Ms. Illyes, my sixth grade teacher reading Tom Sawyer to the class. She read a chapter or two a day. We listened. I loved it. It was better than television… and I loved television more than anything. By high school, reading was done to get by....

I’ve used Francesca Lia Block’s Witch Baby in my English methods course for many years. I’ve taught it in my own ELA classrooms (Here are some ideas I’ve used introducing the book to students). As a teacher educator, I use it to model and provide guided practice in curriculum development. As we talk about lesson plannings, students and I also talk about the novel. I lead demonstration lessons, and students workshop group lesson plans. Invariably students home in on the novel’s magic realism...

I’m not an avid fan of William Blake’s poetry. I’ve read it, first as an undergraduate many, many years ago and again as a graduate student many years ago. I probably wouldn’t have read his poems otherwise. There’s something to be said about making people read things they normally wouldn’t. Of course, finding meaning in what we read is both a personal and social act. What Blake means to me has as much to do with who I am and the world in which I live than it does with who Blake was or wrote....

One of my favorite short stories is Anton Chekhov’s “Gooseberries.” It was one of his last, written in 1898. He died a few years later of tuberculosis. He was forty-four years old.

In “Gooseberries,” Ivan Ivanych tells two friends about his brother’s lifelong desire to own a farm. The brother dreamed of growing and selling gooseberries. And it happened. The dream, though, blinded the brother to those around him. His wife, who financed his dream, died at a young age. The peasants who worked...

In the 1990s, I taught middle grades in an all-Black boys’ school on Chicago’s West Side. I was the only English teacher, left to stem students’ past education struggles and create interest in the world of print. After a few false starts that no doubt felt familiar to what they had already experienced in school, my students and I figured something out about literacy—it really does emanate from the personal: personal connections, interests, uses, etcetera. Because of that, anything that...

I lived off and on—mostly on—for six years in Anderson, Indiana, during the late 1970s and early 1980s. A good part of it was spent in the house shown here. I lived in all three apartments at one time or another. They were my college days. Anderson was an automobile factory town. General Motors parts plants spread across a large swath of the southeast side, employers of over 25,000 people in the late 60s, early 70s. My step-grandmother and step-grandfather worked at Guide Lamp and Delco-Remy,...

If you had asked two months ago how my heart health was I would have laughed at the absurdity of the question. Why ask about something so obvious? My heartrate was consistently around fifty—a runner’s heart. It took a herculean effort to get it above 140, and then it came down precipitously fast as soon as I stopped...

It is not often in life we have a chance to celebrate collectively those who were pivotal to who we become in later life. And seldom can we do it publicly. I was given the chance when the 1982 Anderson College’s cross country was inducted into the school’s athletic hall of fame on October 11, 2025. I was a member of that ’82 team.

Our coach was Larry Maddox. He recruited all of us. He was the singular adult influence the first twenty-two years of my life.

I am proud to have been able to...

Anyone who grew up poor in rural America will be familiar with some aspects of Ian Henry’s life in Kenneth Cadow’s young adult novel, Gather (Candlewick, 2024). They will understand the sixteen-year-old’s bias toward the wealthy and his desire to live his life as he pleases, in his case, ensconced in nature. They may also have had experienced school as irrelevant in the face of daily struggles and impositions.

What some readers may not know, or may not have experienced, is the generational...

This book review may appear dated. To bring it up to date, substitute MAGA for Tea Party.

A few years ago I read Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land. As a sociologist, Hochschild spent a few years getting to know Tea Partiers in Louisiana who had in various ways been affected by environmental disasters and economic downturns over the course of their lives. They were all White, working class, conservative southerners. She wrote early in her book of her desire to scale the...

I started writing middle grade novels when I was well into my fifties. I sent my first query at 58 and got my first rejection soon after. Six years and a couple hundred queries later, the rejections keep coming, and not for one book but for two. What have I learned? Literary agents, on balance, are too young.

Let’s face it, getting a literary agent is hard. Anyone in the game has heard the stories of the writing slog amidst mounds of rejections. Combine that with the sound of crickets that...

When I turned 63, I decided it was time to start a new career. I had been a university professor for twenty-five years and had been thinking about a change for a while. The plan wasn’t to stop being a professor, at least not immediately. Instead, I committed to a timeline for ramping up to the new career as I wound down the old one. I gave myself five years, or until I turn 68, to become a middle grade fiction writer.

Detractors might pass off a five-year career transition at 63 as a phased...