They Also Write for Kids — And So Do We

Catalog description

This course invites students to explore the work of contemporary authors who are celebrated for their adult fiction but whose works of children’s literature have often been neglected by scholars and even by general readerships. Examining adult fiction by Chinua Achebe, Edwidge Danticat, Anita Desai, and Louise Erdrich alongside the middle-grade novels that each of these writers have produced for pre-teens, we will consider how their oeuvres trouble misconceptions of children’s literature as blandly uninteresting to academics and adults at large. While many assume that #kidlit functions as a fundamentally inferior alternative to other books, with less political verve and less literary sophistication, we will instead read our writers with an eye toward how the connections and continuities between their books “for children” and “for adults” serve to destabilize these received ideas about the nature and potentialities of children’s literature. In the process, we will closely examine our course readings from a craft perspective, drawing inspiration from them as we work on our own creative writing. Students will have the opportunity to write flash fiction or short stories intended primarily for adults as well as to compose the opening chapters of a middle-grade novel – and will be guided in reflecting on the strategies they themselves have adopted for producing powerful and sophisticated work for age-diverse audiences.