The 31st annual Virginia Hamilton Conference on Multicultural Literature for Youth will honor award-winning author/illustrator David Macaulay as the 2015 Virginia Hamilton Literary Award Winner. Macaulay will give a keynote address at the conference, along with Newbery Honor children's writer and illustrator Grace Lin and Coretta Scott King Award-winning young adult author Rita Williams-Garcia.
The Virginia Hamilton Conference is held each year at Kent State University and is sponsored by the School of Library and Information Science, the College of Education, Health, and Human Services and the Office of Continuing and Distance Education.
The conference provides a forum for discussion of multicultural themes and issues for children and young adults.
The theme for this year's conference is "Building Global Citizens Through Literature.
Held at the Kent State Student Center, the conference will begin on the evening of Thursday, April 9, 2015, with dinner and a keynote address by Macaulay.
Macaulay is a British-born American illustrator and writer. Earning him fans of all ages, his award-winning books feature detailed illustrations and a sly sense of humor. They have sold more than three million copies in the United States alone and have has been translated into a dozen languages.
Before publishing his first book, Cathedral, in 1973, Macaulay worked as an interior designer, junior high school teacher, and as a teacher at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Macaulay is perhaps best known for the award-winning international bestseller The Way Things Work, which was expanded and updated in 1998 and renamed The New Way Things Work. This brilliant and highly accessible guide to the workings of machines was dubbed a "superb achievement" by the New York Times and became a bestseller.
Macaulay's many awards include the Caldecott Medal and Honor Awards, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, the Christopher Award, the Washington Post-Children's Book Guild Nonfiction Award, and received the Bradford Washburn Award, presented by the Museum of Science in Boston to an outstanding contributor to science.
In 2006, he was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, given "to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations." As "an individual of distinction in the field of children's literature," Macaulay delivered the esteemed 2008 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture, an honor bestowed upon him by the American Library Association.
The conference will continue all day on Friday, April 10, 2015, with workshops and keynote addresses by Lin and Williams-Garcia.
Lin is the author and illustrator of picture books, early readers and middle grade novels. She focuses her work on the Asian-American experience because she believes "books erase bias, they make the uncommon everyday and the mundane exotic A book makes all culture universal."
Her 2010 Newbery Honor book, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, was chosen for Al Roker's Today Show Kid's Book Club and was a New York Times bestseller. Ling & Ting, her first early reader, was honored with the Theodor Geisel Honor in 2011.
Williams-Garcia is the author of the New York Times bestseller One Crazy Summer, which won the Newbery Honor, Coretta Scott King Award, and the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction.
She is also the author of several distinguished novels, including Jumped, a National Book Award finalist; Every Time a Rainbow Dies, a Publishers Weekly Best Children's Book; Fast Talk on a Slow Track, an All-American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults, and Like Sisters on the Homefront, the 2014 winner of Coretta Scott King Award.
Williams-Garcia holds a faculty position at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in the Writing for and Young Adults Program.
For more information, visit https://www.kent.edu/virginiahamiltonconference.