Event

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In honor of Penn's Homecoming, join us for a reading and panel discussion of writing for children and young adults, moderated by moderated by LIZ VAN DOREN and featuring four alumni writers, LORENE CARY (C'78), BETH KEPHART (C'82), JORDAN SONNENBLICK (C'91), and KATHY DEMARCO VAN CLEVE (C'88).

LORENE CARY is an author, educator, and social activist. Her non-fiction includes magazine articles and blogs as well as her memoir Black Ice, and a collection of stories for young readers, Free! Great Escapes from Slavery on the Underground Railroad. Novels include The Price of a Child, chosen as the first One Book One Philadelphia offering, Pride, and If Sons, Then Heirs. Cary has written scripts for videos at The President's House exhibit on Independence Mall. In 1998 Cary founded Art Sanctuary to enrich urban Philadelphia with the excellence of black arts. To create an intentional transition, she stepped down as director in 2012. Cary was president of the Union Benevolent Association; and she served as a member of Philadelphia's School Reform Commission from 2011-13. Cary’s honors include UPenn’s Provost's Award for Distinguished Teaching, The Philadelphia Award, and honorary doctorates from Swarthmore, Muhlenberg, Colby, and Keene StateColleges, and Arcadia and Gwynedd Mercy Universities.

BETH KEPHART is the author of 18 books and a teacher of creative nonfiction at Penn. Her recent books include the memoir Nests. Flight. Sky.: On Love and Loss, One Wing at a Time; Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir, which won the Books for a Better Life Award (Motivational Category) and was named a top writing book by Poets & Writer; Small Damages, which won a Carolyn W. Fields Honor Award; Dr. Radway’s Sarsparilla Resolvent, A Kirkus Best Children’s Book of 2013; and Going Over, a 1983 Berlin Wall novel that won the Parents’ Choice Award Gold Medal in Historical Fiction, is a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults Selection, is a Booklist Top Ten Historical Novel for Youth, and a Junior Library Guild Selection, among other honors. Kephart writes for the Chicago Tribune and the Philadelphia Inquirer and was included in the Philadelphia Literary Legacy Exhibition at the Philadelphia International Airport. She blogs daily at www.beth-kephart.blogspot.com. Three new books are forthcoming.

JORDAN SONNENBLICK (C’91) was a public school teacher for fourteen years, but always dreamed of being a writer, so one day in 2003 he sat down and started his first young adult novel, Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie, which was published by Scholastic in 2005. Jordan was as surprised as anybody when the book took off: it received several starred reviews, was named to the American Library Association’s Teens’ Top Ten List, sold over 550,000 copies, and has been translated into twelve foreign languages. Jordan followed Drumswith five more acclaimed books for teens: Notes from the Midnight Driver,  Zen and the Art of Faking It, After Ever After, Curveball: The Year I Lost My Grip, and Are You Experienced?. Jordan has also written the Dodger and Me trilogy of funny fantasy books for middle-grade readers, which includes Dodger and Me, Dodger for President, and Dodger for Sale, all published by Macmillan. His website is the cleverly-named www.jordansonnenblick.com.

KATHLEEN DEMARCO VAN CLEVE is a novelist, screenwriter, film producer and teacher. Her screenplay, Fugly, co-written with John Leguizamo, and starring Leguizamo, Rosie Perez, Griffin Dunne and Radha Mitchell, finished filming early October 2010 in New York City. Her most recent novel, Drizzle, was published in March 2010 under her married name, Kathleen Van Cleve, and received starred reviews from Publisher's Weekly and The Bulletin for the Center of Children's Books, and was named to Indiebound's KidsNext Spring 2010 list. She has produced the films Joe the King, (winner of the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival), Pinero, (a Miramax release starring Benjamin Bratt) and Undefeated (an HBO film starring Leguizamo). Her other novels are Cranberry Queen (optioned by Miramax Films) and The Difference Between You and Me. She graduated with a dual degree from the Wharton School and the College of Arts & Sciences in 1988. She has been a consultant for NYU's Tisch School of the Arts M.F.A. dramatic writing program as well as for Tisch's undergraduate dramatic writing candidates. She lives with her husband and two young sons in Philadelphia.

ELIZABETH VAN DOREN is Editorial Director of Book Publishing for Highlights for Children and Boyds Mills Press. Over the course of her book publishing career, she has published a wide variety of award-winning books in all genres, from picture books to tween and teen fiction to nonfiction for all ages and has worked with many well-known and highly-lauded writers. Books Van Doren has edited have been named a National Book Award Finalist, a Coretta Scott King Honor Book, ALA Notable Book, Kirkus Best Books of the Year, Bank Street Best Books of the Year, New York Times Top Ten Books of the Year, among many other awards and honors. In addition to acquiring, editing, and publishing books, Van Doren also teaches creative writing at The University of Pennsylvania and New York University. As a former high school teacher and a parent, she is very attuned to children's interests and what sparks their imagination.