Monthly Archive for November, 2011

An interview and a book discussion

Published on November 14, 2011 in Africa, book review, Books & News, South Africa, teenagers and This Thing Called the Future. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Awesome poet and interviewer Marissa Bell Toffoli interviewed me last month and that interview is now live on her website. A highlight: “I want to have the world be tilted a little, to have it look a little bit different to people than before they came into the book…” Please check it out, vote for it, leave comments. Thanks!

The Assembly on Literature for Young People (ALAN) did a fantastic conversation/review of This Thing Called the Future on their blog, Under the Radar. Also a place to post comments! Here’s an excerpt from one of the participants, Bucky: “I like that while it is realistic, there are so many elements of the spiritual and supernatural too. Readers might enjoy deciding for themselves if some of the more mystical elements can be explained by science or something else. Does everything have to have a logical explanation? Subjects or themes explored include sibling and family relationships; conflict between ancient cultural practices and contemporary society; puppy love; coming of age, and more. While the story is a bildungsroman, it bridges the space between literary realism, magical realism, and the more metaphysical “fever dream” element of many vision quests.”

 

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In the Bay Area with Beverley Naidoo

Published on November 1, 2011 in Africa, Bay Area and Books & News. 0 Comments Tags: , .
Beverley Naidoo with Jessica Powers at Mission High School

Beverley Naidoo with Jessica Powers at Mission High School

Last week, Beverley Naidoo, the acclaimed children’s writer from South Africa, was in the United States as the keynote speaker for the USBBY conference. I was lucky enough to do several events with her in the Bay Area after her talk was through. We presented at two high schools in San Francisco–Mission High School and George Washington High School. We presented on animals in Africa and animals in our books–which is more complicated than you’d think. Animals in my book, This Thing Called the Future, are all presented on a spiritual level when Khosi encounters witchcraft. For Beverley, she refused to write about or think about animals for so long since she remembered how Africans were presented as animals in children’s picture books when she was a child (Babar being a famous example). But recently, she realized that Aesop must have been North African rather than Greek, that his tales are stamped with African-ness, and so she has begun re-telling Aesop’s tales.

On Thursday, we had a presentation and discussion at Stanford, co-sponsored with the Center for African Studies and the Education Department. We talked about the way that stories embed ideas in children, both negative and positive, and we discussed the possible ways books can be used, and the way that both of us awakened (through childhood and beyond) to the social realities around us that have caused both of us to write books that we believe really matter.

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