A Companion to Children's Literature

Emma McGilpis a primary teacher in the Scottish Borders. She has a PhD from the University of Glasgow. Her doctoral research explored the multiliteracies learners developed when translating the verbal and the visual in international picturebooks. As a researcher she has published and presented about the potential of using multilingual picturebooks in the classroom. Research interests include literacies, translated and international children’s literature, reader response, and practitioner enquiry. Current projects include an international partnership with a school in Nepal using digital literacies and coding for a social purpose and reflecting on the affordances of technologies to support global learning and citizenship during the pandemic.

Mary Jeanette Moranis Associate Professor of English at Illinois State University, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on children’s and adolescent literature that focus on issues of ethical and feminist theory, narrative voice, and social justice. Her publications include articles on speculative fiction, Anne of Green Gables , the Judy Bolton mystery series, and feminist emotion in middle-grade family stories. Her current project investigates the intersections between feminist ethics, particularly ethics of care, and fantasy for children and young adults. She is an active member of the Children’s Literature Association, where she has served on several committees, including the Astrid Lindgren Committee and the Grants Committee.

Claudia Nelsonis Professor Emerita of English at Texas A&M University. She is author or editor of 13 books, most recently Topologies of the Classical World in Children’s Literature: Palimpsests, Maps, and Fractals (2019, co-authored with Anne Morey). She is a past president of the Children’s Literature Association and past editor of the ChLA Quarterly ; her work has been recognized with the ChLA Book Award and the ChLA Article Award, as well as with Choice Outstanding Academic Title and Highly Recommended Title designations. With Elisabeth Wesseling and Andrea Mei-Ying Wu, she is currently editing The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature and Culture .

Gretchen Papazianis a professor of English at Central Michigan University, where she teaches children’s literature, diversity literatures, and American literature. Her publications include a book chapter on Easy Readers (“Reading Reading in the Early Reader” [2017]); as well as articles on picturebooks (“Color Multiculturally” [2018] and “Colorful Feelings” [2020]) and video games (“A Possible Childhood” [2010]); and two edited essay collections ( Game on, Hollywood! [with Joseph Michael Sommers] and Emotion in Texts for Children and Young Adults [with Karen Coats forthcoming]). She is also a founding member of Central Michigan University Press’s series Scholarship and Lore: Games for Learning, a publication venue for academic, peer-reviewed games for game-based learning in higher education.

Melanie Ramdarshan Boldis a senior lecturer/associate professor at the University of Glasgow, where she teaches and researches children’s and young adult (YA) literature and book culture. Her research specialism is inclusive youth literature and book culture, with a particular focus on the representation of people of color, and the experiences of authors and readers of color. Melanie has published widely on the topic, alongside numerous publications about contemporary book culture. Her book Inclusive Young Adult Fiction: Authors of Colour in the United Kingdom, 2006–2016 , was published in 2019. Melanie’s interest in youth literature and book culture extends beyond academia. She was a judge on the UKYA book prize and the Scottish Teenage Book Prize, and is on the Advisory Boards for the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) Reflecting Realities project, the Pop-up Pathways into Children’s Publishing project, and Literature Alliance Scotland, and works with a number of cultural organizations across the United Kingdom.

Rebecca Rogersis the E. Desmond Lee Professor of Tutorial Education at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Her research and teaching focus on literacy studies, preparing teachers to be culturally and linguistically responsive, and critical discourse studies.

Ivy Linton Stabellis Associate Professor of English at Iona College in New Rochelle, NY, where she teaches children’s, young adult, and early American literature. Her research centers on nonfiction for and by children; her essays have appeared in Children’s Literature , The Lion and the Unicorn , and several books.

Joseph T. Thomas, Jr.is a poet and scholar of American poetry and children’s literature. He directs the National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at San Diego State University, where he is a professor of English and comparative literature. Thomas has published numerous essays and two books, Poetry’s Playground (2007) and Strong Measures (2007). He has also co-edited two collections, Prizing Children’s Literature: The Cultural Politics of Children’s Book Awards (2016) and All-of-a-Kind: Remembering June Cummins (2020). You can find Joseph on Twitter @josephsdsu.

Doris Villarrealis an assistant professor of literacy education at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. She has 13 years of bilingual elementary classroom teaching experience in urban public schools. Her experiences as a bilingual elementary teacher in Texas have led to her interests in the improvement and support of educational programs that serve students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Her research interests include hybrid language practices in linguistically and culturally diverse teaching contexts with a focus on Latinx children as well as literacy teacher education.

Elizabeth A. Wheeleris Professor of English and founding Director of the Disability Studies Minor at the University of Oregon. Her 2019 book HandiLand: The Crippest Place on Earth analyzes the politics of disability in public space in contemporary British and American young adult and children’s literature. Her scholarship has appeared in The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies , Children’s Literature Quarterly , Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century , Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities , and Constructing the (M)other: Narratives of Disability, Motherhood, and the Politics of Normal .

Vivian Yenika-Agbawwas Professor of Literature & Literacies at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, where she taught undergraduate and graduate courses in children’s/adolescent literature in the department of Curriculum and Instruction. She is the author of Representing Africa in Children’s Books: Old and New Ways of Seeing and co-editor of several books, including Children and Deaf Culture in Children’s Literature and Other Modes of Representations (forthcoming).

Karen Coats, Deborah Stevenson, and Vivian Yenika-Agbaw

The academic study of children’s literature rests on a diverse set of ontological, epistemological, and ethical questions. Scholars, educators, and cultural critics have explored fundamental but often hidden assumptions about what children’s literature is, what it teaches (or hides from) its readers, whose voices and perspectives are heard and valued and whose are silenced or devalued; the search for answers has become as diverse as the questions, sometimes following from, sometimes leading, trends in the literature itself. Children’s literature scholars around the world have been joining in increasingly robust conversations that seek to expand awareness of the richness that can be found in texts for the young, texts that bury themselves deeply in the heart and surely prove foundational to the development of a culture’s sense of what is normal and what is aspirational, what is useful and what is beautiful, what should be preserved and what is best left in the past.