Expanding the Foundation

This volume focuses on a group of authors who began writing in the late 1980s. This group consists of eight authors who expanded the foundation and built a critical reputation that garnered a variety of nominations and awards. These authors are: Rita Williams-Garcia, Jacqueline Woodson, Angela Johnson, Nikki Grimes, Sharon Draper, Christopher Paul Curtis, and Sharon G. Flake, and Jewel Parker Rhodes. This volume has a chapter for each of these eight authors that focuses on their critical reception as authors, then discusses in some detail a single representative work, and, finally offers classroom activities for individual, small group, and whole class activities that will engage students in the work discussed.

Expanding the Foundation; African American Authors of Young Adult Literature, 1980-2000 edited by Bickmore and Clark is a perfectly timed and carefully edited follow-up to On the Shoulders of Giants: Celebrating African American Authors of Young Adult Literature. The selections give readers an inside look into the fascinating lives of some of the most talented literary geniuses of our time, while including instructional strategies for educators and students to think critically and deeply. The book combines a perfect blend of history, research, theory, and practice about African American literature and provides us all--publishers, teachers, librarians, parents and students-- direction for examining African American literature.

Steven T. Bickmore is an Associate professor of English Education at UNLV and maintains a weekly academic blog on YA literature (http://www.yawednesday.com/). He is a past editor of The ALAN Review (2009-2014) and a founding editor of Study and Scrutiny: Research in Young Adult Literature. Shanetia P. Clark, PhD is an associate professor of literacy in the Department of Early and Elementary Education at Salisbury University in Salisbury, Maryland. Her interests include young adult and children's literature, the exploration of aesthetic experiences within reading and writing classrooms, and writing pedagogy.