Insiders, outsiders, and the question of authenticity: who shall write for African American children?

"Let the Portmans go to Ireland, but as you know nothing of the Manners there, you had better not go with them. You will be in danger of giving false impressions. Stick to Bath & the Foresters. There you will be quite at home." (Jane Austen [from a letter to Austen's niece, who had sent her the manuscript of a novel], qtd. in Mercer 307)

This romance was sketched out during a residence of considerable length in Italy, and has been rewritten and prepared for the press in England. The author proposed to himself merely to write a fanciful story, evolving a thoughtful moral, and did not purpose attempting a portraiture of Italian manners and character. He has lived too long abroad not to be aware that a foreigner seldom acquires that knowledge of a country, at once flexible and profound, which may justify him in endeavoring to idealize its traits. Italy, as the site of his romance, was chiefly valuable to him as affording a sort of poetic or fairy precinct.... (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Preface to The Marble Faun vi)

My themes are universal. And because the black people are the people I know, and the part of the group that I am, that is my center, so to speak, so my characters are black. Most of the time.... But it's very difficult when you're a black writer to write outside of the black experience. People don't allow it; critics won't allow it. If I would do a book that didn't have blacks, people would say, "Oh, what is Virginia Hamilton doing?" Yet a white writer can write about anything. (Virginia Hamilton, qtd. in Rochman 1021)

This is a popular Japanese folktale and tells the story of a devoted pair of wild ducks. The illustrations in this beautiful book are subtle and suggestive but also an education in the dress, hairstyles, hierarchical levels of society, homes, customs and, not least, in eighteenth-century Japanese art. (I have been told that there are "inaccuracies" in the representations; the cummerbunds of the ladies are the wrong width and the upper-class ladies sport the hair styles of courtesans. And the Japanese never wear shoes in the house. This doesn't lessen my bonding with this book and, indeed, makes me want to find out more.) (Judith Graham [commenting on The Tale of the Mandarin Ducks, retold by Katherine Paterson and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon] 24)

One central concern of scholars, literary historians, and critics these days is the matter of authenticity, especially the authenticity of cross-cultural and multicultural stories, and the ensuing conflict or question, Who will produce the literature of parallel cultures? An author of the character's own particular culture - or anyone? And for those who feel it doesn't matter (that anyone who can tell a good story should do so), we must ask, What makes a story good? Replicating reality to the fullest? Getting the facts and feelings right? Suppressing or distorting reality to make us think and feel differently? (Giving us new images to think with - and about?) But good for whom? Writers who want or need freedom of expression? Publishers who want the story to sell? Readers who want to find themselves in a book? Readers who want to find others in a book?

And which readers? Those closest to the author's own reality? Or those with different background experiences? Can a really story be good if it does not derive its material from the traditions (the memories, beliefs, preoccupations, and concerns) of an author whose cultural origins are shared by those of the story's characters? Jane Austen, with her concern for social realism, did not think so. And the remark she made about "the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush" (qtd. in Tanner 1) has now become legendary. Nathaniel Hawthorne agreed in principle, and that is why he decided to make his story The Marble Faun, set in Italy, a fantasy and why he took great pains to sidestep a realistic portrait of his Italian characters. Virginia Hamilton protests the fact that she does not have the liberty of white authors, who either ignore Austen's advice or follow Hawthorne's example.

The question then arises, should Austen's advice be followed? What is the worst that can happen if it is not? Could the belief system of Austen's English niece have seeped into the words, thoughts, and behaviors of her Irish characters, usurping the traditions of the Irish culture being depicted? Could her story have been a really good one if this had happened? Judith Graham says yes, if readers become bonded with the book.

But what about the insiders of the culture being inaccurately presented who are made to feel demeaned, especially when these insiders are children just coming to grips with issues of identity, heritage, and self-esteem? Do we really want children - insiders or outsiders - bonding with inauthentic books? And what happens when they are left to do so? Consider Alice Walker, who tells how she felt about the Disney film in which Uncle Remus "saw fit largely to ignore his own children and grandchildren in order to pass on our heritage - indeed, our birthright - to patronizing white children" (31).

And what about children who are outsiders of the culture being mistakenly presented and are misled to feel that all belief systems are identical to their own; that all people's feelings, perceptions, propensities are the same as theirs - or that theirs is the one that counts? Consider the many adults who have read and loved Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (1911), but never noticed that Mary calls Martha "the daughter of a pig" because Martha had expected Mary to be a native of India, rather than "respectable white people." Then consider the main character of Mitali Perkins's The Sunita Experiment (1993), who does notice, as Perkins herself, growing up Indian-American in California, apparently did.

At times, when inclusion is the point of the story, as with Amazing Grace (London: Frances Lincoln, 1991, and New York: Dial, 1991), an amazingly popular children's book these days, it may seem that little if any harm is done if an outsider like Mary Hoffman, a London writer and journalist, according to my dustjacket, and white, according to my research, has produced the story. (Grace wants to dance the role of Peter Pan in her school play, but she cannot, her classmates tell her. She is black and she is a girl. She is also the best dancer, as she finally shows everyone, so she wins the role.)

On the other hand, if such books, or what we might call the literature of cultural pluralism, crowd out or replace books by insiders that may be more difficult for outsiders to understand but are particularly important for their growing, multicultural needs, then we may need to reassess our priorities. Or we at least need to ask ourselves, If schools and libraries cannot afford to purchase every book that is published, which books should be sacrificed - the ones that explore ethnic differences or those that highlight commonalities among members of different cultures?

Studies by Alan Purves have found that many students want only literature about people with whom they feel they have much in common; otherwise the students are not responsive (see Ostrowski). The idea of multicultural literature (that in which the idea of different world views or cultural references are built into the texture of the book itself - its focus, its emphasis, its subject matter) is a challenging one for readers who are not insiders of the culture being depicted. It necessitates, according to Reed Dasenbrock, that readers become "inscribed" into the text in various ways (17).

The usual way is for readers to undergo an initiation into a different world view: that of a character in a particular cultural group - related to ethnic, religious, or national ties - in a particular era. And in the area of children's or young adult literature, the initiation occurs as the character is growing up African American, Native American, Jewish American, Italian American, Indian American, and so on, although quite often these days we consider multicultural literature to be that written about members of underrepresented cultures, which in America usually means Asian, African, Native, and Hispanic American. How the writer goes about initiating the character, however, is a particularly individual thing. Thus, there is no one way to create a multicultural book, certainly no one "right" way, since no two cultural experiences, even of the "same" ethnicity, are ever the same. (Even siblings might tell the supposedly "same" story differently.)

To incorporate readers into the tale, author Faith Ringgold places them into the situations of African American children, often those of earlier times (or the time of her own childhood). Modern readers might find themselves stepping into the "shoes" of barefoot Cassie, eight years old in 1939, in Tar Beach (Crown, 1991), who flies over the scenes of her family's history, telling her own story of growing up African American in New York City. Ringgold thus inscribes readers into Cassie's family's contemporary history by creating a children's picture book from an African American quilt on which was printed across the top and bottom borders the tiny text of her flying-child story. A wandering viewpoint causes readers to travel with Cassie through the pages. Often the viewpoint looks down on the scene, in order to elevate the importance of the characters, as when readers look up to see Cassie flying overhead as the story opens. Then, in the next scene, she is seen flying over her brother, who is lying down on the apartment building roof, across from the other family members who sit talking. Cassie's power (her ability to fly) is therefore a female power, also; she, not her brother, is the one overhead.

Readers, then, view Cassie sleeping below, and they are the important ones, sorting out the fact that Cassie is dreaming and journeying through a past time of family history. Later, readers are positioned above the scene, but at the same time they are alongside Cassie, who is flying over the scene in her dream/wish/memory visions; so they and Cassie look down together to see Cassie's mother sleeping under a vibrant red, green, and yellow African quilt pattern. Thus, child character and child reader assume adult importance: They are watching over the sleeping mother. Most of the time, however, readers are standing alongside Cassie, but outside the "picture": Cassie is no longer visible; she is projecting this story on a picture book "screen" for readers who, alongside her, are viewing it. Flying, says Cassie, takes you somewhere "you can't get to another way." It also means claiming something as your own that is beautiful and has ties to you through family history.

Another and even more challenging way for readers to undergo cultural initiation is for the characters themselves to explore or become inscribed into a different world view alongside the reader throughout the story (character and reader are initiated together every step of the way). This approach is particularly important when the time and place are very different from those of the modern child. In Ringgold's Aunt Harriet's Underground Railroad in the Sky (Crown, 1992), Cassie encounters Harriet Tubman in one of her dream flights and is taken back into slavery days to learn more about her cultural history.

In Virginia Hamilton's The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl (Harper, 1983), Pearl, a goddess on Mount Kenya, looks across the ocean and sees the American slaves, and her strong empathy for them enables her to fly to them, transformed (or disguised) as a bird that rests atop a slavery ship (a bird of passage for the Middle Passage). Later, in America, she becomes a human child, one of the freed slaves who is attempting to find a way to live in the antebellum South during the reconstruction era when many black Americans suddenly found themselves facing man-made obstacles of bigotry and greed.

Readers of both books are being inscribed not only into the historical era but also into the narrative structures, strategies, and movements that the authors have chosen to complement their subjects, in this case genre blending (time-slip historical fantasy) and magic realism (imagined visions or dreamlike sequences sometimes involving levitating figures that represent a character's response to cataclysmic or traumatic events).

Where Ringgold and Hamilton use written text along with illustrations, Tom Feelings places readers and historical characters into the same situation the characters faced in their own day in a remarkable pictures-only book, The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo (Dial, 1995). Readers are, as a result, inscribed into the slavery condition, just as the slaves are, at the exact moment of their passage. Feelings's intention is to align reader and character, one inside the other, in order to achieve a total emotional response to this painful human experience: "I want readers to participate in this," says Feelings, "to bring something to it" (qtd. in Ingalls B7). He carries out his intention through a combination of visual and critical strategies that may supersede any picture book artist's inventive conception for historical visualization.

Using the "colors" black and white for power and symbolism and imaginative evocation, a design of abstraction for graphic energy, and realism for reader identification, Feelings begins with the cover picture of the chained slaves aboard a boat on their way to the large "white" slave ship waiting farther out in the water, which is designed intentionally to draw reader and character together - to fuse them as one as they step into the larger "picture" of the story:

The figures in the boat you can't see so clearly.... They're very dark. You have to look into the dark to see. When you look, you realize there are human beings, drawn realistically, who are chained. And then you realize you are in the boat with them, and the chains are connected to you. I wanted to make the thing ... seductive. So that even if you couldn't take it at a certain point and [you] put the book down and closed it, the images will pull you back and you'll open it again. (qtd. in Ingalls B7)

Feelings says he wanted to create a book he "could hand to the people in Guyana, in Puerto Rico, in Cuba, in all the places that Africans were taken, and they would understand it." Who was the book made for? "For black people, of course ... [and] for whoever opens it and can feel the human feelings" (qtd. in Ingalls B7). So the question of audience enters into any attempt to define the term multicultural literature. The primary audience, from Feelings's perspective, is the cultural group being represented. But readers of all groups are also important potential participants of the human experience that affects us all.

What counts is being an author with experiential understanding, gained usually through heritage (growing up in a particular ethnicity) and, if the time span is historical, through extensive reading and imaginative bonding with the people of the era, which produces strong commitment to helping others into and through the same emotional "passage." For twenty years Feelings worked on this book, reading all the materials he could find (journals, history books, fiction, ships' logs), reworking the book six times in order to, in his words, "reach that spot" in his readers (the book is marketed for both children and adults) "that is open to the truth" (qtd. in Ingalls B6). Such perseverance does not rule out an outsider with strong empathetic feelings about a project; it is perhaps more often seen, however, when there is an inherited cultural imperative.

The multicultural book, then, is one that is thoroughly researched, in the case of historical genres or those involving realistic dimensions, and, at the very least, authentic in the sense of freedom from stereotypes and inaccurate details. An English children's book like Amazing Grace can be seen as multicultural in the broadest sense, in that it focuses on children of different color and background learning to live together or learning to respect one another's ways of thinking, living, or being. With such a large immigrant population (Indian, African, African Caribbean), English multicultural books often emphasize this broader conception of the term (with outsiders writing many of these books and educators, critics, and reviewers of the dominant English culture, like Judith Graham in the epigraph above, finding no fault with it). But for American children, the stereotypical (racist, sexist) thinking the book strives to overturn may be outdated. (Why couldn't Grace play Peter Pan? they ask. Sandy Duncan did. Diana Ross could.)

For English children, it might be otherwise. In fact a subtle "message" of the book may be that both the indigenous Anglo-female and the anti-feminist Indian male hold back the African Caribbean female, since in Grace's English classroom, it is blonde Natalie who tells Grace that she can't be Peter Pan ("'He isn't black'") and Indian Raj who tells her she can't be Peter ("'That's a boy's name'"). In the play, as it turns out, Natalie gets the part of Wendy, and Raj plays Captain Hook. So the names and casting choices may be the author's way to give each of these children a way to play the role he or she "fits" (an Indian boy gets to be a sexist villain of some importance; Natalie gets to be the confident big sister; Grace gets the lead). The question arises, however, is this type-casting or stereotyping?

What has been especially problematic about American multicultural books (and the same appears to be true in England) is the marketing tactic of coupling issues, which results in painting the multicultural child with a very broad brush. In Amazing Grace you get two "isms" for the price of one. And in the sequel to this book, Boundless Grace (Dial 1995), as the book is entitled in America, and Grace and Family (Frances Lincoln, 1995), as it is called in England, Hoffman piles issue upon issue, none of which, in a picture book format, can be treated with the depth it deserves. First of all, Grace is a member of a bi-cultural family, African and African Caribbean; then her African father, she discovers, has a second family in Gambia, and this ultimately involves cross-cultural travel to Gambia for Grace and her African Caribbean grandmother, who lives with her and her mother. In addition there are the identity conflicts of two homes and two families, and a child's home culture where, in her school books, there are no stories about families like Grace's that don't live together - black, single-parent families, it is implied - and as a last issue, there is a child making her own "story" as she accepts her two families as they are.

Of equal concern, Grace is, in the second book, said to be from America in the American edition and from England in the English edition: "The children thought it was wonderful to have a big sister all the way from America [England]." And information about Mary Hoffman and the illustrator Caroline Binch, as Londoners, is dropped from the American book jacket, which also shows no pictures of them as white Londoners. But what is the rationale (except perhaps a wider market) for "dubbing in" a different national identity for Grace, especially since nothing in either book reflects an African American ethnicity? There is one sentence in the first book that attempts to reproduce an authentic speech pattern of the insider culture. The Caribbean grandmother, in the last sentence of the book says," 'If Grace put her mind to it, she can do anything she want.' "But can this one speech pattern produce an authentic portrait of the black child in England, much less an African American child in the American edition? (And is this particular speech pattern really an accurate one, or does the outsider author simply imagine that all black children, in all places, at all times, speak the same so-called "Black English"?)

Can we be satisfied with a jacket blurb that says "the author traveled to Gambia to ensure the accuracy of every background detail" and that "this commitment to authenticity brings the book vividly to life"? At least one group of American teacher-reviewers do seem to be buying, quite readily, into the advertising assertions:

Caroline Binch's beautiful, painted illustrations are carefully researched. The artist visited Africa and her photographs became the source of the book's illustrations. Mary Hoffman also traveled to Gambia in Africa to make sure that every detail of her text was accurate. The students appreciated how much legwork is required in professional writers' and artists' lives. (Backer 64)

Publishers these days seem to have decided that traveling to a place can substitute for cultural affiliation or long-term interest and research in a culture. But do professional writers really operate in the manner that these writing teachers assume? Did Jane Austen advise her niece to imagine a story about Ireland and then make a brief visit to check out the facts? (Or did she tell her to stay at home where she was most at home?) Did Tom Feelings spend a few weeks in Uganda and then produce the pictures for Moja Means One (Dial, 1971)? Or did he live, work, travel, and study the culture there for several years beforehand?

So we come to the difference between deep and surface structures of multicultural literature and what ultimately produces greater concern for critics when outsiders attempt to write for other ethnicities: that writers will attend to surface features (observable details, facts, and idioms) but miss the bigger picture - the values, beliefs, and world view of the insider that can so easily be subsumed, usurped, or crowded out entirely by an outsider's pervasive thinking. What is especially strange in both Boundless Grace and Grace and Family is that Grace, with her African Caribbean grandmother (whom she calls Nana), doesn't seem to have been affected to any extent by the Caribbean oral tradition, as Virginia Hamilton's Junius was so strongly affected by his Caribbean grandfather's tellings in Junius Over Far (Harper, 1985).

Instead the text reads, "Grace knew lots of stories about wicked stepmothers - Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel" - and "she wanted a father like Beauty's." When she arrives in Africa, she tells her stepbrothers and stepsisters "all the stories she knew - Beauty and the Beast, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin" - and she finds it "amazing how many stories were about fathers who gave their daughters away." Hoffman does give a passing nod to the African storytelling tradition, when at one point Grace's father shows her the place in his Gambian village where his grandmother told him stories. And Grace replies that her Nana tells her stories, too. But there is no follow up to this comment.

Wouldn't the stories told to her by a Caribbean grandmother have been a bigger part of Grace's literary repertoire than they are here? Might they even have been so much a part of her cultural heritage that they gave her some kind of sustenance for the conflicts she faced? What stories might she have heard from her grandmother? How might they have differed from European stories? And how might their differences have been woven into this story - or even changed it significantly? Do African, African Caribbean, or African American folktales have wicked stepmothers? Do they show fathers giving their daughters away? Maybe they don't; in John Steptoe's Cinderella variant Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters (Lothrop, 1987), the father doesn't give his daughters away, at least not until they are of marriageable age - and then he accompanies them to the marriage place himself, along with a wedding party from his village.

Not every African American child reader would be familiar with Steptoe's picture book nor the African tale Steptoe draws upon for his story (G. M. Theal's Kaffir Folk-lore, 1896); thus, neither might Grace. The question is whether or not outsider authors are familiar with insider materials when they begin writing such a book and whether editors should consider the problems they face in changing a child's national identity for the American edition of a book. Not only does it insult members of an insider culture to treat them in such a generic manner, but it also produces a weaker book in literary terms (plot, conflict, depth of characterization, and most of all thematic "texture").

Perhaps Steptoe's book or a Caribbean grandmother's stories would have given Grace a different picture of her father - or has he become so Europeanized that he has become a Beauty-and-the-Beast father of European tradition, and no longer the father of Gambian traditions? Was he trying to get back to African traditions - and that's why he is there now and why he has invited Grace to Gambia? Is Grace's conflict rooted in the fact that she does read so many European fairy tales (that she has become Europeanized in England, despite a Caribbean grandmother)? None of this gets sorted out in the book, nor can it be, since the publisher has turned Grace into a generic child whose identity changes whenever the book crosses a national border. The problem is also one of focus (too many issues for a picture book); therefore another problem may be genre. There are seeds of a novel here, not a genre that an outsider author can tackle easily, or complete sufficiently, through travel research.

When outsider books succeed (The Horn Book gave Boundless Grace a glowing review), they seem to do so because of, rather than in spite of, the author's outsider status. (No one has to be inscribed into anything.) In fact Boundless Grace, says the reviewer, "transcends social, cultural, and geographic boundaries" (Burns 451), which means that the book is not really about what multicultural books are about: growing up in a parallel culture, or in this case growing up African American. Grace is growing up; she is said to be from America - in the American edition at least. But even though it is the author's purpose to picture a child who represents a world that is culturally diverse (a great deal is made of Gambian clothing, at any rate), we see only a surface texture of Gambian ways of life and nothing that can really be defined as American or African American. Have cultural boundaries been transcended here, or merely overlooked? What does Grace (or the reader) really learn about the deep structure of her ancestral heritage? Actually not much beyond what the illustrations show of a Gambian open market or Gambian dress styles.

A second-grade, Anglo-American teacher told me recently, "My students love Grace! She's strong and determined. Nothing stops her!" And when I described some of my concerns about authenticity, she replied very much like the English educator, Judith Graham, that none of those things bothered her. They didn't get in the way of the story for her and the fact that the book was good for children. They saw a strong female, she said, and that gave them hope that they could be strong too - not just the girls, but the boys, too. Amazing Grace, she said, was a color-blind and a gender-blind book. Like Graham, she had bonded with the story - and so nothing else mattered. Should it? Books like this might be described as literature of cultural pluralism, since they "forge a communal identity," in Henry Louis Gates's words, that "may not yet have been achieved" (xiv). And that may be why white mainstream readers like them. They produce a good feeling that children like Grace, whom a reviewer describes as "one of the most engaging protagonists in contemporary picture books" (Burns 450-51), are out there dancing the lead or discovering crocodiles, fathers, and beautiful clothes in Gambia - and all's right with the world.

The general consensus of so-called mainstream thinking has always been that literature of cultural pluralism, at its best, helps children form empathetic bonds with fictional characters, and if these characters portray underrepresented cultural groups, children of the dominant culture bond with those of parallel cultures. "If we all could see each other exactly as the other is," Ezra Keats once said, "this would be a different world. But first I think we have to begin to see each other" (qtd. in Silvey 363).

In the 1960s, outsiders to African American culture produced books about a child finding a place of his own (Elizabeth Starr Hill's Evan's Corner [Holt, 1967]), a child's adventure with snow (Ezra Jack Keats's A Snowy Day [Viking, 1962]), a child learning to whistle (Keats's Whistle for Willie [Viking, 1964]), a child learning to live with a new sibling (Keats's Peter's Chair [Viking, 1967]), and a child who finds the perfect teddy bear (Don Freeman's Corduroy [Viking, 1968]).

In the decades since, we have seen a child who loves drawing everywhere and all the time (Rachael Isadora's Willaby [Macmillan, 1977]); a child who gets into trouble with his little brother, loses a tooth, and finds a new friend (Ann Cameron's The Stories Julian Tells [Knopf, 1981]); a child who plays detective (Cameron's Julian, Secret Agent [Random, 1988]); and a child imagining what it would be like to grow up in Africa (Virginia Kroll's Masai and I [Macmillan, 1992]). And because the children in all these books happen to be black (and the world view truly a world view), the black child became a world "player." None of the children in literature of cultural pluralism are necessarily American children; therefore, they are neither African American nor African in any specific way. Thus, like Grace, they are less ethnic, in core identity, than generic (the broad-brush approach) in their behavior, actions, and supposed feelings.

At other times white writers have given us books about white children finding a place of their own with black friends and black families in books like Lois Lowry's Autumn Street (Houghton, 1980) and Jerry Spinelli's Maniac Magee (Little, 1992). And even though the black characters in these books are necessarily American (Lowry's story is set in Boston, Spinelli's in Pennsylvania), because the emphasis is so strongly one of commonalities rather than differences, they fit easily the category as it is currently defined: the literature of cultural pluralism. Like the stories about Grace, the story is written from a white point of view (the outsider author's own "world" view). And readers of the same view can bond easily with the book and the characters because they feel so comfortable with that view (despite the fact that the black characters might never, in reality, share or possess that view).

What books like these seem to provide, more than anything else, are cathartic, "feel-good" experiences for white readers. In the case of Autumn Street, the black cook, Tatie, helps Elizabeth to see another side of her rigid, proper grandmother, by telling her the story of the grandmother attending a black child's funeral (that of Tatie's grandson) and not caring "right then" what color she or the black child's grandmother was. In the case of Maniac Magee, the white child continues to expose his black friend, Mars Bar, to various degrees of white bigotry in the hope of teaching the overt message: "Do not judge people by their color." The lesson never gets taught, however - and this is the big lesson of the book - even though the black child sacrifices his own life to save the child of the worst of these bigots, who learn the "lesson" and then quickly forget it. In either case, the black character is used as an instrument for the white reader's "feel-good" experience (there but for the grace of God go I as a bigot), and the books are showered with accolades and awards. (Maniac McGee actually won the Newbery Award in 1991).

"Feel-good" books do not necessarily present authentic experiences, even in Newbery winners, unless outsider authors are exploring or representing differences at the same time that they are attempting to bridge them. And bridging differences becomes something of a double bind for the outsider, who cannot really explore the insider culture/Tom the inside - s/he has not lived the insider's experience. Lowry doesn't show us anything of Tatie's own grief for her grandson; her feelings must be subordinated entirely to serving the white child's feelings. We are left to assume that the hearts of the black church members were just as touched by the white grandmother's "liberated" gesture in entering a black church as readers are expected to feel. Spinelli tells rather than shows us differences between the white and black families (the McNabs and the Beales) depicted here in order to emphasize Maniac's color-blind condition in a racist world. Either family could be labeled any possible ethnicity, and the focus would simply change to classism or prejudice generally.

Arnold Adoff has been more successful in creating what might be described as an authentic literature of cultural pluralism, as a special category of multicultural literature. (Here the clauses - and emphasis - of the Keats quote would be reversed: If we all could begin to see each other, this would be a different world. But first we have to begin to see each other more clearly, or more completely.) In Adoff's story-poem picture books, he depicts children growing up in bi-cultural families (Black is brown is tan [Harper, 1973]), a girl who loves to run (I am the running girl [Harper, 1979]), and a girl reflecting on her bi-cultural identity (All the Colors of the Race [Lothrop, 1982]). Adoff is the father of bi-cultural children from his marriage to Virginia Hamilton, and he has incorporated authentic experiences of his own family life in these books.

In Black is brown is tan, he shows these experiences rising out of both European American and African American traditions important to the lives of both "branches" of the children's family. Hearing idioms and familiar expressions of the different family members and hearing about their foods, ways of preparing them, their music, songs, musical instruments, and storytelling activities - all of this helps to inscribe readers into what it means to be growing up between two particular ethnicities. The children are like all children in all families engaged in activities at mealtime, bedtime, a family-together time, but we see them depicted here as related specifically to the different ethnic backgrounds of the two parents. Cultural backgrounds are bridged by the concept of one family, but they also count as important for the story (they are explored).

Much of the same is true of All the Colors of the Race, which is probably Adoff's best poem-storybook, due to the imagery, language patterns, thought-provoking ideas, and humor. But here, since the intended reader is a slightly older child, Adoff can explore in greater detail the backgrounds of extended family members and the child's experiences at school (playing Harriet Tubman in the play) and at home (discovering different hair styles), as well as the child's inner feelings about race, prejudice, being different, being loved. A companion piece occurs in I am the running girl. Dedicated to the Adoffs' own "running girl Leigh," the book seems to be simply about running; however, the way Adoff plays with the word race produces for readers a deeper look at multicultural relationships, so that the text is particularly effective for showing all the different strands of cultural heritage in all of these girls who run - and running through Rhonda/Leigh. The illustrations by Ronald Himler support well this textual purpose.

In the novel form of this category, authentic literature of cultural pluralism, there is Sharon Dennis Wyeth's The World of Daughter McGuire (Delacorte, 1994), in which eleven-year-old Daughter (African-Italian-Irish-Jewish-Russian-American) explores her multi-faceted heritage (sorted out very nicely for readers in the cover art of Jerry Pinkney) in and out of her classroom, when her absentee father returns home and helps her to deal with the everyday problems of growing up. In her case, these problems include the more specific conflicts of identity she faces as a poly-ethnic child, conflicts she eventually can transcend, thereby realizing that she is a citizen of the world.

Unlike the books about Grace, Wyeth's main character is learning that families of fragmented ethnicity make traditions of their own that can nourish the need for family history at those times when stories are lost, forgotten, or thinly textured. Grace is making a story where there supposedly isn't one, but we see neither new traditions nor old stories here, simply messages: Families are what you make of them; stories are what you make of them. But what is Grace supposed to make of "Beauty and the Beast"? That it can have a different ending for her, if she wants to accept things as they are and has a great vacation?

What counts for the reviewer of Amazing Grace, we have seen, is that the book "transcends social, cultural, and geographic boundaries." But this "transcending" in so many examples of the "literature of cultural pluralism" occurs without the protagonist learning about the actual cultures being transcended (without readers being inscribed into them, as Adoff and Wyeth manage to do). And this is the real problem with simplistic thinking about American society, according to Gates: "... it's only when we're free to explore the complexities of our hyphenated American culture that we can discover what a genuinely common American culture might actually look like" (175-76). In other words, what gets to count as "universal" is an illusion, with an "Anglo-American regional culture" masking itself as "our common culture" (175).

Perhaps it all begins, this appropriation by the outsider of an insider culture, when writers like Hawthorne find themselves in foreign (or "foreign") places, because there is no way to write a new or different story at home (or the writer has run out of ideas for doing so). Hawthorne began borrowing Italian materials for the shadow, the mystery, the antiquity in them, in the same way that Americans at home began borrowing African American materials for the imaginative spirit in them. And just as Hawthorne, in 1859, was producing romance or fanciful realism in Italy because their "actualities" did not need to be so "terribly insisted upon" (vi), a young boy named Joel Chandler Harris, three years later, in 1862, was listening to the slaves on a Georgia plantation telling animal tales that he would retell for audiences around the world. The genre of folktale had the same effect for Harris that leaving America had for Hawthorne: He did not have to struggle with producing realistic portraits of African American manners and characters. Each writer succeeded because each divorced himself from what he really didn't know - the deep structure of an intriguing foreign (or "foreign") culture not his own.

Fortunately, Harris's work today, except as literary and cultural history, is not indispensable. Even without his collections, the stories would have come down the line orally, and African American tellers today would still be producing collections like Hamilton's The People Could Fly (Knopf, 1985) and Her Stories (Scholastic, 1995), filled with humor and rich, cadenced language to rival any other telling. And when storytellers tie the stories in their collections or picture books to the African or African American teller who inspired their own telling, as Lester does in the Afterword to Black Folktales (Richard Baron, 1969; illustrations by Tom Feelings) and Steptoe does in his Forward to Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters, they bring to light older and often neglected books. (Hurston's Mules and Men might have been out of print in 1969 when Lester's book was published, but that is certainly no longer the case.) They also inform American readers about African tales published or told in other countries, as does Lester's reference to the English edition (1968) of Bakare Gbadamosi and Ulli Beier's Yoruba stories and Steptoe's reference to G. M. Theal's collection of Kaffir tales. They situate modern readers in the social setting of the time when the stories were originally (or continually) told. Perhaps of greatest importance, however, they add more African and African American materials to the world caldron of stories: Divulging a source of a folktale (usually another collection of folktales) gives us all a look, as Lester says, at "many more good stories" (158).

Examining so many stories for possible use, African American story collectors and storytellers (oral, written, visual, editorial) ultimately become the ones with critical expertise in choosing the best stories to retell, recast, or create anew. They are also the ones with the need, as Gates says, to "arrive at theories of criticism indigenous" to the "black tradition" (67). He notes several ways African American writers for adults have explored their own materials through the years, and we can see these same "ways" filtering through African American literature for children and young adults as well.

In the beginning were the slave narratives: told, retold, remembered, later written down, published, read, reread, and then even later recast, recreated, transformed. Then there was the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and an interest by black editors like James Weldon Johnson in refuting stereotypes and promoting a theme of struggle shared by many African American writers through the production of black art, as a "self-defense against racist literary conventions" (Gates 29). African American literature and visual art forms were to come from black, rather than white, models in order to provide insight into the social realism of this group. The children's magazine founded by W. E. B. Du Bois, The Brownies' Book (1920-21), reflected this same goal.

In the 1930s, after Du Bois had set the standard and issued the call for books and illustrations modeled on and developed for African American children, two prominent members of the Harlem literary establishment, Langston Hughes and Ama Bontemps, discovered in Popo and Fifina: Children of Haiti (Macmillan, 1932), a way to wed adult aims for African American art and children's literature. Hughes's poetic language effectively complemented Bontemps's understanding of both childhood playfulness and parental concerns. "Langston had the story and ... I had the children," Bontemps, a father of six, later said (qtd. in Hopkins 49). Bontemps went on without Hughes to produce more books about the black child, at the same time searching for a more realistic way to depict the child's speech. From a total use of standard English in Popo and Fifina, he reverted to moderate use of regional Alabama dialect in You Can't Pet a Possum (Morrow, 1934), finally producing in Sad Faced Boy (Houghton, 1937) an early version of Black English, as he moved from reproducing phonemic levels of speech to the replication of syntactic levels. Bontemps's books are perhaps even more important, however, for their authenticity. Here, for the first time, black children could read books written by a black adult who had observed the segregated worlds of both rural Alabama and urban Harlem.

A new emphasis emerged in the 1960s, Gates explains, when Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal published an anthology called Black Fire (1968), producing a black canon defined by the black vernacular and "the urge toward black liberation, toward 'freedom now' with an up-against-the-wall subtext" (31). Virginia Hamilton's biographies of the early 1970s focused on two prominent African Americans who were often up against the wall: W. E. B. Du Bois (Crowell, 1972) and Paul Robeson (Harper, 1974). And two of her novels from these same years utilized this metaphor as the centerpiece of the books and her discussion of them.

Going through the "wall" is essentially what The Planet of Junior Brown (Macmillan, 1972) is about: emotional, physical, and mental survival in the modern, urban world. "When you find yourself up against the wall long enough," said Hamilton in 1972, "you begin to calculate your endurance against the wall. You begin to know how strong you are" ("Thoughts" 63). Building a wall to avert human disaster (the "burial" of home, heritage, and identity) is what M. C. Higgins the Great, written two years later (Macmillan, 1972), focused upon. Warren Miller's The Cool World (1959) reproduced both naturalistic setting and language in this novel about black urban street life - and the "wall." The book became an important "nugget" of one of Hamilton's later novels, Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (1982).

To create works of authentic cultural representation, Hamilton begins most often with a character and some question, problem, or premise about the character. Although characters of the Hamilton canon have been African American, Amerind, African Caribbean, African, Black Indian, mixed (black/white, black/Amerind, African American/Caribbean), and white, her protagonists have usually been African American, except in the case of Arilla Sun Down (Morrow, 1976), in which the main character is part Native American, as was Hamilton's grandmother. What Hamilton brings to the Amerind character then is "sensitivity" and cultural memories (her mother often talked about her Amerind ancestry), she notes, rather than a "cultural imperative" (qtd. in Mikkelsen, "Virginia" 71), plus imagination and knowledge gained from research about Black Indians: "I write from the black experience for an audience as free and as large as I can find," says Hamilton ("Hagi" 90). That audience is generally young adults of approximately twelve or thirteen years old. The problem is one common to young adults generally in contemporary America (an absentee parent, a coming-of-age identity crisis, a new home in a new town, a visit to an uncle's home in the country one summer, a sibling rivalry or conflict), although it may also have a strong multicultural focus. For the writing of Arilla Sun Down, Hamilton says she wondered "what would happen in a strong black identity family [a bi-cultural family] if the Indian identity became very strong" (qtd. in Mikkelsen, "Virginia" 71).

Hamilton weaves into this "universal" situation a richly textured picture of African voices, traditions, values, beliefs, idioms, concerns, people, and stories that helps to inscribe the reader (of whatever ethnicity) into her own particular parallel culture - that of the Midwestern, rural African American. (The term parallel culture is one generated by Hamilton to designate "polyethnic, culturally diverse communities of present-day America," or communities other than those of the dominant culture: equal yet diverse ("Toiler" 6). At least seven interwoven threads produce the cultural fabric of Virginia Hamilton's books, or seven ways she has of inscribing readers into her own view of her own ethnicity:

1. Storytelling is a cultural way of knowing for the characters who tell stories, one to another (often an older character tells a younger one stories to teach about the heritage and history of a family or the entire cultural group), and to themselves, in order to amplify and comment on the story as a whole.

2. Ethnic feminist values permeate the books (women, especially mothers and foremothers of female children, tell stories for the transmission of culture). In fact, females appear in a range of situations, particularly those in which the supernatural exerts a magical and mystical power.

3. Mysteries of all kinds run through Hamilton's work, and stories may end with or without the mystery being solved (there is often an unresolved ending in order to keep a mystery alive).

4. The happy ending is often an elusive one also: Bad could follow good, as African Americans knew well. But Hamilton's world view rests on what she calls "the black American hopescape" ("Everything" 370), so the ending is at the same time always upbeat.

5. There is a preoccupation with freedom, equality, respect, and privacy for the individual and with the way members of the cultural community care for and bestow importance on the individual, particularly the growing child (it takes a village ...).

6. Multiple perspectives about characters provide a sleight of hand for this author who is continually testing reader assumptions (subtleties of characterization - such as the use of color to heighten fictional mysteries, overturn conventions, and reverse stereotypical thinking - produce complex and complicated humans, never entirely good nor bad).

7. An important subject is the relationship of humans and animals (ecology is a natural part of the African American world, since the slavery condition caused black people, like Native Americans, to value the land and those dependent on nature as they were).

The values Du Bois emphasized (equality, justice, and self-esteem) produced for Hamilton "the moral sense of things" that she would later bring to her books as a "black American hopescape" ("Everything" 370). So there has been a direct line from Du Bois (1920) to children's literature today. We see this stream of Johnson and Du Bois operating most clearly in Hamilton's early novels, Zeely (Macmillan, 1967) and The House of Dies Drear (Macmillan, 1968), in which children learn to take pride in native materials and forms out of which family members carve, whittle, and create (oak tables, pine sculptures, dramas, histories, and stories). This "line" is alive and well at the present moment with the recently published collection The Best of The Brownies' Book (Oxford UP, 1996), edited by Dianne Johnson-Feelings, so that children today can not only learn about their cultural history; they can participate in it anew.

Another writer who has contributed to literary theory and African American traditions, especially in relation to children's and young adult books, is Walter Dean Myers. In 1994, interviewer Roger Sutton asked Myers, "Do you think it's possible to write a story about kids who just happen to be black?" Myers replied: "Absolutely. You can. You can write a story like this, but the question is, are you writing this story from a black point of view ... not from any conscious deliberation, but because it's what you remember. It's your cultural fabric" (178). What Myers was really advocating was, at the very least, authentic literature of cultural pluralism. So we are back to our original question: Who should write for the black child? The outsider who sidesteps the insider point of view by placing a black child outside any particular cultural fabric? The insider who often resents this sidestepping? We have only to remember the Keats-Steptoe controversy that arose as Keats completed his seventh book about Peter, of A Snowy Day fame, in the early 1970s and drew a blistering attack from black critic Ray Shepard.

Keats was not telling the real story of a black child, said Shepard. The color of his characters was never relevant to the story. If white writers saw equality only in terms of similarity, his theory went, they could never really tell the black child's story. Thus the black child needed black writers, like John Steptoe, who could expose a reader to different ethnic experience and show that children could be equal and still be different. The notion that the black child might have separate feelings because of separate experiences was a new one to white writers, who for so long had followed the credo of the '40s - that all people have similar basic emotions, a fact more significant than differences in heritage, environment, or training.

And once Shepard's idea caught on with publishers, the doors opened wider for black writers and artists like Carole Byard, Lucille Clifton, Tom Feelings, Muriel Feelings, Leo Dillon, Nikki Giovanni, Eloise Greenfield, Sharon Bell Mathis, Mildred Taylor, and Camille Yarbrough in the 1970s, and more recently for Jeannette Caines, Pat Cummings, Valerie Flournoy, Vanessa Flournoy, Joyce Hansen, Angela Johnson, Patricia McKissack, Walter Dean Myers, Jerry Pinkney, Eleanora Tate, and Joyce Carol Thomas in the 1980s, and for Floyd Cooper, Donald Crews, Christopher Paul Curtis, Carol Fenner, Deborah Hopkins, Elizabeth Howard, Gloria Pinkney, Brian Pinkney, James Ransome, Faith Ringgold, and Jacqueline Woodson in 1990s.

White writers and illustrators have continued to publish books featuring black characters: Arnold Adoff, Lloyd Alexander, William Armstrong, Marcia Brown, Louise Fitzhugh, Betty Greene, Ann Grifalconi, Trina Hyman, Rachael Isadora, Elaine Konigsberg, Jill Krementz, Mercer Mayer, Jerry Spinelli, and Margaret Zemach. But since these writers did not actually grow up African American or African, they have not, for the most part, been able to call up the necessary cultural memories required to present the most authentic black point of view.

Granted Jill Krementz's A Black Girl Growing Up in the Rural South (Harcourt, 1969), a photographic picture book featuring a nine-year-old living in a large, single-parent family in Montgomery, Alabama, and still, in the late '60s, attending a segregated school, is a rare achievement and an important historical document. Rachael Isadora's Ben's Trumpet (Greenwillow, 1979)is an outstanding work of art. There are the eloquent picture storybooks of Ann Grifalconi and Arnold Adoff that go far beyond surface multiculturalism. And the artwork of Diane Dillon, in collaboration with Leo Dillon, is always vibrant and exciting.

On the other hand, there have been disturbing examples of stereotypes (Brown, Konigsberg, and Meyer), caricatured artwork (Hyman), cultural inaccuracies in pictorial details (Zemach), unconvincing narrative voice (Brooks, Fitzhugh, and Greene), unconvincing setting (Alexander), artwork filled with implied negatives (Brown), condescending and superficial treatment of the ethnicity portrayed (Armstrong, Lowry, and Spinelli), and no distinguishing ethnic traits whatsoever for a black protagonist (Greene).

A defensive and largely white "industry" of publishers, editors, critics, and reviewers often seems unwilling or unable to see that children of all ethnicities deserve literature of artistic merit presented authentically - or well-told stories. Far too often critics leave out the factor of authenticity when they proclaim a story "well-told." But a good story is an authentic story, as Jane Austen explained centuries ago and as Hawthorne acknowledged by producing a romance about Italians since he knew he didn't really have enough experience with the social realism of Donatello's world to produce an authentic picture. For the last century, African American writers have been asking nothing less than to tell their own stories. Who can imagine any Anglo-American writer (for that matter any writer of any number of ethnicities) having to make such a plea? Who can imagine any Irish, Jewish, Greek, or Yoruba child having to learn about her ancestral heritage as told by an outsider to her culture - and by outsiders often too arrogant or too indifferent to do the necessary research?

Writers, no matter what their ethnicity, seem to see it a little differently. "You need to grow as an artist," Myers told Sutton, "and you can't do that when you're forced into an ethnic kind of role" (180). He recalls writing on subjects as various as bull fighting, kickboxing, and men's adventure stories when he "wasn't thinking only of writing about 'the problem'" (179). Myers's complaint comes down on the side of experience, realism, the actual, the representative, the real, or a sense of social realism, in that he knows about a great many things and feels that the narrative "voice" of these subjects transcends ethnicity or speaks to a larger world than that of his own ethnic background.

Hamilton also argues for a way out of ethnic roles: "Imaginative use of language and ideas illuminates for us a human condition, and we are reminded again to care who we Americans are" ("Hagi" 91). And her writing process is the best lesson in everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-creating-authentic-fiction of the human condition: "I create characters and the characters create the society in which they live. Once the characters are defined, they have brought their world with them, and so I have uncovered that world .... it's like a painting. You fill in all this around the person - the history, the time, the place ... the way somebody moves or what they say or how they act" (qtd. in Mikkelsen, "Virginia" 75).

Myers has through the years enlarged his experiential "canvas" far beyond the two-inch African American square with which he began; he wants to be able to paint on his own entire canvas. In Shadow of the Red Moon (Scholastic, 1995), he produces two races of fantasy children struggling for survival; thus he finds a way to expand far beyond his own ethnic "picture." Hamilton's large canvas is overflowing with many larger-than-life figures. For Hamilton, imagination involves risk, but it also manages to rescue her each time from difficulties, limits, and impediments. "I'm always running up against" limitations, says Hamilton, "and knocking it down in different ways, whichever way I can" (qtd. in Rochman 1021). She asks only for equity. If others are allowed to paint on her canvas, she wants the same privilege: to paint on theirs. Who presents the best case?

Is is it down with the barricades - all barricades for all writers - and on with the show? No. Those who have lived the black experience, in any of its myriad dimensions (region, nation, ethnicity, social group, economic status, gender), can still do the job better. This is not to say that an outsider's story should be censored or suppressed; it is too important for showing how we have seen and depicted insider cultures through the years. Let Helen Bannerman's Little Black Sambo (Frederick Stokes, 1900) remain on the shelves beside Julius Lester's Sam and the Tigers (Dial, 1996) and Fred Marcellino's The Story of Little Babaji (Harper, 1996) to teach us all more about the American past. Let Amazing Grace remain on the shelves beside Joyce Carol Thomas's Brown Honey in Broomwheat Tea (Harper, 1993) and Gingerbread Days (Harper, 1995) to teach us more about the American present and to remind us that, if the social consciousness of children is shaped by outsider writers, the result will be a homogenized culture and synthetic rather than real literature, whether or not it is produced with the eloquence of William Armstrong's Sounder (Harper, 1969) or the mediocrity of Amazing Grace.

We need to see the widest spectrum of insider voices - old and young, female and male, urban and rural, North and South, Midwest and Far West, upper-class and under-class - and ethnicities of the most diverse blendings - monocultural, bi-cultural, cross-cultural, multicultural. And the more of these poly-ethnic voices the better. The question is no longer whether we will have white authors or black authors, since race is a social construct and we are all, in some way, "mixed"; nor is it whether we will have authentic or inauthentic authors, since cultural memories (experiential understandings) will nearly always produce greater authenticity than research alone can provide. It is instead a question of whether we will have diversity within authenticity. And we are more likely to have such nuances, such distinctions, such subtleties, such realism, whatever the genre, if insiders tell their own stories. Ultimately it's not the size of the canvas but the type of brush strokes that matters. Austen painted with the tiniest of brushes for her grand designs.

Writers like Hamilton (and Julius Lester, Patricia McKissack, and John Steptoe, among others), who have made a lifetime choice of listening to, collecting, and transmitting the stories of their own culture, reveal that it does matter who tells the stories. They are the ones who know the tales firsthand from their own family and community storytelling traditions. They are the ones who have heard and internalized the language patterns in the cultural transmissions. They are also the ones who often spend long hours searching out the long-hidden or forgotten African American and African sources for new tellings. They are the ones with the cultural imperative to do the telling, and to get it right.

Works Cited

Austen-Leigh, J. E. A Memoir of Jane Austen. Ed. R. W. Chapman. London: Oxford UP, 1926.

Backer, Joan, et al. "Weaving Literature into the School Community." New Advocate 9 (Winter 1996): 61-74.

Burns, Mary. Rev. of Boundless Grace. Horn Book 72 (July/Aug. 1996): 450-51.

Dasenbrock, Reed. "Intelligibility and Meaningfulness in Multicultural Literature in English." PMLA 102 (Jan. 1987): 10-19.

Gates, Henry Louis. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

Graham, Judith. "Using Illustration as a Bridge Between Fact and Fiction." English in Education 30 (Spring 1996): 18-25.

Hamilton, Virginia. "Everything of Value: Moral Realism in Literature for Children." Journal of Youth Services in Libraries 6 (Summer 1993): 363-77.

-----. "Hagi, Mose, and Drylongso." The Zena Sutherland Lectures, 1983-1991. Ed. Betsy Hearne. New York: Clarion, 1992. 75-91.

-----. "Thoughts on Children's Books, Reading and Ethnic America." Reading, Children's Books, and Our Pluralistic Society. Ed. Harold Tanyzer and Jean Karl. Newark: International Reading Association, 1972. 61-64.

-----. "A Toiler, A Teller." Many Faces, Many Voices: Multicultural Literary Experiences for Youth; The Virginia Hamilton Conference. Ed. Anthony Manna and Carolyn Brodie. Fort Atkinson: Highsmith P, 1992. 6.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "Preface." The Marble Faun. New York: NAL, 1961. v-vii.

Hopkins, Lee Bennett. More Books By More People. New York: Citation P, 1974.

Ingalls, Zoe. "Images of Slavery." Chronicle of Higher Education 15 Feb. 1996: B6-B7.

Mercer, Caroline. "Afterword." Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen. New York: NAL, 1980. 307-14.

Mikkelsen, Nina. Virginia Hamilton. New York: Twayne, 1994.

-----. "Virginia Hamilton: Continuing the Conversation." New Advocate 8 (Spring 1995): 67-82.

Ostrowski, Steven. "Literature and Multiculturalism: The Challenge of Teaching and Learning About the Literature of Diverse Cultures." National Research Center on Literature Teaching and Learning Literature Update Fall 1994: 1-2, 4.

Rochman, Hazel. "The Booklist Interview." Booklist 1 Feb. 1992: 1020-21.

Shepard, Ray. "Adventures in Blackland with Keats and Steptoe." Interracial Books for Children 3 (Autumn 1971): 2-3.

Silvey, Anita, ed. Children's Books and Their Creators. Boston: Houghton, 1995.

Sutton, Roger. "Interview" [with Walter Dean Myers]. School Library Journal 40 (June 1994): 24-28.

Tanner, Tony. Jane Austen. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986.

Theal, George. Kaffir Folk-lore. 1896. Westport: Greenwood, 1970.

Walker, Alice. Living By the Word. New York: Harcourt, 1989.

Nina Mikkelsen is the author of more than thirty articles in the field of children's literature and of Virginia Hamilton (Twayne, 1994) and Susan Cooper (Twayne, 1998). She received her Ph.D. in English from Florida State University and has taught at universities in Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.