The Little Read 2011

An Afternoon with Deborah Wiles

Saturday, April 9, 2011
P. E. Monroe Auditorium, Noon.
(Booksigning followed by a luau on the lawn.)

Deborah Wiles is the 2011 Little Read author. While reading to her children, Wiles fell in love with children’s books. She sold her first picture book, Freedom Summer (Simon & Schuster/Atheneum 2001), in 1998, followed that same year by her first novel, Love, Ruby Lavender (Harcourt 2001). Wiles’ work has received the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award, the PEN/Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Working Writer Fellowship, and a Golden Kite Honor from SCBWI. Her novel Each Little Bird That Sings was awarded the E.B. White Read Aloud Award and was a 2005 National Book Award finalist. Wiles lives in Atlanta, GA. In 2010, she will publish the first novel in a young-readers trilogy about the 1960s.

The Little Read is a county-wide literacy program for elementary school students funded by a generous grant from the family of Ron and Sandra Deal in memory of their daughter Sara Catherine Deal Temple who loved children and loved teaching them to read.  For the 2010 program additional support has been provided by the Unifour Foundation.

Now in its fifth year, The Little Read is a partnership between Lenoir-Rhyne University’s Visiting Writers Series and the Catawba County, Newton-Conover and Hickory City school systems. In addition, LR’s School of Education provides important curricular support for the program. Other significant participants include The Hickory Public Library, Hickory Day School, and St. Stephen’s Lutheran School.

The Little Read is designed to bring nationally recognized children’s authors to Catawba County to meet with teachers, students, and future teachers enrolled in LR’s School of Education.  In preparation for the author’s visit every student in the county in the designated grade receives their own copy to keep of the author’s book.  So far, The Little Read and its partners have given away almost 10,000 books.  In addition, the School of Education works for an entire semester assembling up-to-date, accurate, and creative teaching materials for Little Read teachers to use in their classrooms.

The first Little Read author was African American author Christopher Paul Curtis winner of  the John Newberry Medal for the most distinguished contribution to American Literature for Children and the Coretta Scott King Award.  Fourth graders read Curtis’ Bud, Not Buddy and fifth graders read his The Watsons Go to Birmingham–1963.  The following year third graders read The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by Jon Scieszka, winner of the Caldecott Honor Medal, and in 2008 Scieszka was named the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress. In 2009 the Little Read author was Bruce Lansky, nationally recognized as “The King of Giggle Poetry.”  Since second graders love word play and silliness in general, they read Lansky’s collection of poems If Pigs Could Fly. Last year, in 2010, The Little Read enjoyed working with fourth grade teachers and students as they read How Tia Lola Came to Visit Stay by Latina author Julia Alvarez.  Hickory’s Centro Latino joined The Little Read partners for Alvarez’s visit.

Contact Information
Dr. Rand Brandes
Lenoir-Rhyne University
Office: 828-328-7207; (fax) 828-328-7204
brandes@lr.edu