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By Cynthia Leitich Smith
for Cynsations

Obituary: Yumi Heo by Shannon Maughan from Publishers Weekly. Peek: "[Henry] Holt’s Laura Godwin shared this remembrance:

'Yumi was extremely gracious, enthusiastic, and inquisitive,' she said. 'I loved the way she incorporated ‘mistakes’ into her art rather than erasing or deleting them.

"If she drew a squiggle where she hadn’t intended, it would show up in the final art as a tree or a rabbit or whatever struck her fancy. She was part artist, part magician—and always an inspiration.'"

Yumi Heo Memorial Fund from Go Fund Me. Peek:

"Please show your support in honor of internationally loved children’s book author and Illustrator and creator of Polka Dot Penguin Pottery, Yumi Heo.

"Your support will help continue two of Yumi’s dreams, the steady training of her daughter as a professional figure skater and the founding of a scholarship program to help students in Korea who have big dreams and little resources."

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By Cynthia Leitich Smith
for Cynsations

“Don't be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don't have to live forever, you just have to live.”

--Tuck Everlasting

'Tuck Everlasting' Author Natalie Babbitt, Of Hamden, Dies At Age 84 by the Associated Press from The Hartford Courant. Peek: "Babbitt's literary career started in 1966, when she illustrated a children's book written by her husband and was encouraged by its editor to continue writing and illustrating children's books herself."

Obituary: Natalie Babbitt by Shannon Maughan from Publishers Weekly. Peek: "The subject matter—is living forever a good thing? —was somewhat controversial when the book [Tuck Everlasting] was published in 1975, especially in schools, but strong word-of-mouth and support from educators and librarians helped it grow into an enduring favorite."

Tuck Everlasting author Natalie Babbitt dies at 84 from The Guardian. Peek: "The 1975 novel, which has sold over 3.5m copies...has been adapted into two movies and a Broadway play..she was a National Book Award finalist for The Devil’s Storybook in 1975."

Cynsational Notes

She received many honored including a Newbery Honor for Knee-Knock Rise (FSG, 1971) and the inaugural E.B. White Award in 2013.

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By Carol Lynch Williams
for Cynthia Leitich Smith's Cynsations

In the early part of last year, Rick Walton, one of my best friends and a prolific picture book writer, was diagnosed with a terminal and aggressive brain tumor.

For many years before this diagnosis, Rick battled early-onset Parkinson’s disease.

Recently, the tumors returned (after a surgery that left Rick partially paralyzed) and as I write this, my friend, my hilarious, clever, word-twisting friend, lives out his last days.

I’ve wandered around the house crying far too much, visiting Rick when I can.

This world of grief is something we all experience in one way or another. No one is exempt from sorrow. It makes up a part of who we are and so grief finds its way into many of my novels. My characters grapple with love lost, death, abuse. I write about life. The sad part.

Writing about grief, telling the true story of a sorrowing character, is tremendously important.

 Readers need examples of survivors. But what happens when that grief becomes too much for the writer?

These last few weeks, as Rick has become more and more sick, has found me not wanting to write unless I must. I don’t believe in the muse nor do I believe in writer’s block. Writing is hard work and we must work to get words on the page.

I do think, however, there are drags on our creativity—events that can eat up our words almost before they are formed. That’s where I am now.

Many years ago, it seemed my worlds crashed around me. I went through a divorce, lost the home I’d raised my girls in, ended up moving every few months trying to find a place for my children and me to settle. I was desperate for a place to call home.

At the same time, four people in my life died, money became more and more scarce, a close relative experienced two psychotic breaks, a drugged neighbor kept trying to break into our rented house . . . and when I thought I could bear no more, I went to two unrelated funerals in two days.

I felt overwhelmed with grief. At one point I finally cried out to my God, “I believe in you but do you believe in me?” That accumulated sorrow led to my young adult novel Waiting (Simon & Schuster/Paula Wiseman, 2012).

But

but

there were other times

other events

HarperCollins, 2016

other devestations

when my heart and my body, and my spirit even, felt unable to do anything, including write.

There were times when I wept alone and in the open.

Times when I wondered if I could draw in a breath.

Then, I despaired.

I found myself hoping for courage and the ability to do what I had to do: write.

Here are a few things, past the hoping, that helped me get the courage to do the hard thing of finishing a novel. I:

1. Prayed. Talking to God is an important part of who I am. I spent hours talking, weeping and talking some more.
2. Exercised. I took off walking, and talking, alone. This exercise permitted my body to breathe and to relax, to rid myself of layers of grief.
3. Shared the pain. There seemed a time when even a grocery store checker asking me how I was brought on my sharing. That speaking up lightened the load, made it feel possible for me to keep going.
4. Gave myself room and time. It’s okay if the words don’t come right away. They will come.
5. Trust yourself. You will write again. It will happen. The next thing you know you’ll find yourself allowing new characters in your life, then wrestling in that awkward middle part of the novel, then typing those triumphant words, THE END. 

Every day since the news that Rick will soon die, I’ve gone to see him. I hold his hand, talk to him about my own life, read him messages from those who love him and can’t travel to Utah to tell him goodbye themselves.

But I haven’t written.

S&S/Paula Wiseman, 2016 (a funny ghost story)

Nothing creative.

Not my blog, not either of the two novels I should be rewriting, not on the mid-grade or YA novel I started this summer.

I’m waiting.

For words.

For peace.

For the sorrow to not be as heavy.

I wish you all could have known Rick Walton as he was years ago. You’d love him like I do. He’s pretty darned fantastic. I’m going to miss him.

My best friend. My Rick.

More from Carol

Rick Walton passed away peacefully, with his mom and sister by his side, three days after I completed this writing.

Cynsational Notes

Rick Walton's books included Frankenstein: A Monstrous Parody, illustrated by Nathan Hale (Feiwel & Friends, 2012); Girl and Gorilla: Out and About, illustrated by Joe Berger (HarperCollins, 2016), and Bullfrog Pops! An Adventure in Verbs and Objects, illustrated by Chris McAllister (Gibbs Smith, 2011).

A legacy of inspiration, remembering Utah children’s book author extraordinaire Rick Walton by Ann Cannon from The Salt Lake Tribune. Peek: "In the end, the people Rick inspired will go on to inspire others who will inspire others who will inspire others. And because he adored people as much as he adored words, his circle was large. His influence will be felt by individuals who may never know his name." See also How Writer Rick Walton Inspired Utah's Literary Wellspring by Rachel Piper from The Salt Lake Tribune and Utah Children's Authors Build a Community from Publishers Weekly.

About Carol
 
Carol Lynch Williams, who grew up in Florida and now lives in Utah, is an award-winning novelist with seven children of her own, including six daughters.

She has an MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College, and won the prestigious PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship.

The Chosen One (Griffin, 2010) was named one of the ALA’s Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers and Best Books for Young Adult Readers; it won the Whitney and the Association of Mormon Letters awards for the best young adult novel of the year; and was featured on numerous lists of recommended YA fiction.

Carol’s other novels include Never Said (Blink, 2015), Glimpse (Simon & Schuster, 2010), Miles From Ordinary (Griffin, 2012), The Haven (St. Martin's 2012), and Signed, Skye Harper (Simon & Schuster/Paula Wiseman, 2015). See also Sisterhood, Body Image, and Sexual Abuse | Carol Lynch Williams on “Never Said” by Shelley Diaz from School Library Journal.

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By Cynthia Leitich Smith
for Cynsations

From Barbara Seuling's Author Website: "...children's book editor, author, illustrator and teacher. For several years Barbara worked as an editor for Delacorte Press and Yearling Books at Dell Publishing Company. Later, she moved to J. B. Lippincott & Co.

"As author and/or illustrator of her own books, Barbara became a featured speaker at many educational and writers' conferences and served for many years on the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators' Board of Advisors. She taught writing at Bank Street College and at The Writer's Voice in New York City before establishing The Manuscript Workshop in Vermont..."

From SCBWI: "One of the SCBWI's earliest members her sense of humor shone through in the many books she both authored and illustrated. Two of her more popular series were her Robert books, and her wildly successful Freaky Fact series, including Elephants Can't Jump and Other Freaky Facts About Animals (Dutton, 1985)."

Obituary: Barbara Seuling by Shannon Maughan from Publishers Weekly. Peek: "Outside of her own children’s book projects, Seuling used her extensive publishing experience to lead small private writing workshops. Her adult nonfiction title How to Write a Children’s Book and Get It Published (Wiley, 2004), first released in 1984, was considered a key read for aspiring authors and is currently in its third edition."

Cynsational Notes

I read the 2nd Edition

Popular series by Barbara

In 1995, when I decided to begin writing for young readers, I was living in downtown Chicago. I didn't know anyone in the business. I'd never heard of SCBWI.

I walked to a bookstore on Michigan Avenue, to a shelf of writing craft and publishing information books in the basement, pulled a dozen or so titles, sat down on the floor and began looking through them. I bought two or three. Barbara's (Scribner, 1991) was the one that most clicked.

I read it cover-to-cover, highlighter in hand, and then I re-read it. I learned from the book, formed a plan for moving forward with the dream that would become my life's work.

Thank you, Barbara, for helping me take the first steps of this journey.

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By Cynthia Leitich Smith
for Cynsations

Author Lois Duncan, died in June while Cynsations was on summer hiatus.

Lois Duncan Obituary: Bestselling author of fiction for young adults, including the thriller I Know What You Did Last Summer by Julia Eccleshare from The Guardian. Peek: "She was born Lois Duncan Steinmetz in Philadelphia, and grew up in Sarasota, Florida. Lois wanted to be a writer from childhood, and submitted her first typed manuscript to Ladies’ Home Journal when she was 10."

Obituary: Lois Duncan by Shannon Maughan from Publishers Weekly. Peek: "After attending Duke University for a year... She entered her YA project Debutante Hill in Dodd, Mead & Company’s Seventeenth Summer Literary Contest and earned the grand prize: $1000 and a book contract."

Lois Duncan, 82, Dies; Author Knew What You Did Last Summer by Daniel E. Slotnik from The New York Times. Peek: "Though her books had their share of violence, Ms. Duncan said she was 'utterly horrified' when she saw the [1997] film adaptation of “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” which...turned her novel, about a group of teenagers desperately trying to conceal an accidental killing, into a horror tale in which the same teenagers are systematically dispatched by their hook-wielding victim." Note: To clarify, I heard Lois speak about this at an SCBWI conference. It wasn't the violence per se but rather the way it was trivialized for cheap thrills. Her novel had a strong moral center that was absent from its film adaptation.

I Know What I Read That Summer by Carmen Maria Machado from The New Yorker. Peek: "Her prose is unfussy and clean. She centered her books on young women, and her writing considers themes that have come to obsess me as an adult: gendered violence, psychological manipulation, the vulnerability of outsiders."

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By Cynthia Leitich Smith
for Cynsations

Joyce Carol Thomas, Berkeley children’s author, dies at 78 by Shradha Ganapathy from The Daily Californian. Peek: "Celebrated local children’s author Joyce Carol Thomas — a poet, playwright and winner of the National Book Award — died Aug. 13 at Stanford University (Medical Center)."

Obituary: Joyce Carol Thomas by Shannon Maughan from Publishers Weekly. Peek: "Thomas was born on May 25, 1938 in the small town of Ponca City, Okla., where she lived until the age of 10. Her family then resettled in rural California where Thomas learned various farming chores and would work long summers harvesting crops alongside Mexican migrant workers from whom she learned to speak Spanish and developed a love of the language."

Joyce Carol Thomas, Who Wrote of African-American Life, Dies at 78, by Daniel E. Slotnick from The New York Times. Peek: "Ms. Thomas wrote mostly adult plays and poetry before the publication of her first young-adult novel, Marked by Fire, in 1982. It won the National Book Award for children’s fiction in 1983."

Prize-winning author Joyce Carol Thomas dead at 78 by the Associated Press from The Times Free Press. Peek: "Other works included Bright Shadow, Brown Honey in Broomwheat Tea and The Blacker the Berry. Thomas was also a three-time nominee for the Coretta Scott King award for outstanding children's books by an African-American."

Joyce Carol Thomas, children’s author who accented black rural life, dies at 78 by Matt Schudel from The Washington Post. Peek: "Although she had lived in California since she was 10, Ms. Thomas found a never-ending source of literary inspiration in the rural fields and small towns of her native Oklahoma. She sought to draw portraits of black life different from stories in modern urban settings or in the time of slavery."

In Memory: Joyce Carol Thomas by Edith (Edi) Campbell from Crazy QuiltEdi. Peek: "Ms Thomas taught for more than two decades at the University of California Santa Cruz, University of Tennessee and at Purdue University. She is survived by children and grandchildren. And, her books."

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By Cynthia Leitich Smith
for Cynsations

Harry Mazer: Obituary from Legacy.com. Peek: "...died on April 7, 2016, 71 years after he leapt out of a B-17 bomber that had been shot down over Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, during the last mission of World War II.

"Harry was one of the few survivors of the crew, a story he loved to tell and re-created in a fictionalized form in his young adult novel, The Last Mission. He received a Purple Heart and an Air Medal with four bronze oak leaf clusters for his service."

Cynsational Notes

Harry was married to fellow children's book author Norma Fox Mazer for 69 years, until her 2009 death at age 78.

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From Macmillan

By Cynthia Leitich Smith
for Cynsations

Obituary: James Cross Giblin by Shannon Maughan from Publishers Weekly. Peek: "Publisher, editor, and award-winning children’s book author James Cross Giblin died on Sunday, April 10, following a long illness."

James Cross Giblin, 82, Wide-Ranging Author of Books for Children, Dies by Margalit Fox from The New York Times. Peek: "...for many years also a prominent children’s-book editor and publisher, was known most recently for his biographies for middle-grade and older readers, among them The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler (2002), which won the Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal from the American Library Association; Good Brother, Bad Brother: The Story of Edwin Booth and John Wilkes Booth (2005); and The Rise and Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy (2009).

Goodbye, Jim by Roger Sutton from Read Roger at The Horn Book. Peek: "Back before it was even a Thing, Jim was writing narrative nonfiction about the damnedest things–windows, milk–and had the gift for conveying his own enthusiasm for his topics to readers who never knew they could find, say, chairs, so interesting."

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15 October 2015. Another cold, grey afternoon in Hamburg-Langenhorn. My last research visit to Helmut Schmidt’s private archive next to his home, a simple bungalow in the northern suburbs of the city. I was there to check some final references before sending my book off to press. But unexpectedly there was a chance to say hello to the former Chancellor, now ailing and housebound, before I took a taxi to the airport.

The post Meeting Helmut Schmidt: the man behind the statesman appeared first on OUPblog.

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By Cynthia Leitich Smith
for Cynsations

Louise Rennison (1951-2016), author - obituary: 'Queen of Teen’ whose comic novels captured the horrors and occasional triumphs of adolescence from The Telegraph. Peek: "Louise Rennison, the author, who has died aged 64, was the creator of Georgia Nicolson, the 14-year-old protagonist of such young adult novels as Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging and Startled by his Furry Shorts; the series achieved sales of 2.6 million in Britain alone."

Goodbye, Louise Rennison – you captured the hilarious horror of girlhood by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett from The Telegraph. Peek: "Rennison understood the unique, farcical horror of being a teenage girl."

Five Things All Louise Rennison Fans Know to Be True by Jillian Capewell from The Huffington Post. Peek: "Thanks to Rennison, I added snogging (kissing), nunga-nungas (breasts), lurrrrrve (self-explanatory) and away laughing on a fast camel (still working that one out) to my repertoire."

"My Hero: Louise Rennison" by Philip Ardagh from The Guardian. Peek: "...there is comfort in the fact that her laughter lives on through the pages of her books. She was a class act and one funny lady." See also Literary Agents Pay Tribute to Rennison from The Bookseller.

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Learn more from Lee & Low.

By Cynthia Leitich Smith
for Cynsations

Obituary: Andrea Cheng by Shannon Maughan from Publishers Weekly.

"Children’s book author and educator Andrea Cheng, whose books often focused on intercultural and intergenerational relationships, died on Dec. 26, 2015 following a long illness. She was 58.

"Cheng was born in El Paso, Tex. in 1957, the daughter of Hungarian immigrants. The family soon moved to Cincinnati where Cheng and her two siblings grew up in an extended family, which she described on her website as 'three generations under one roof.'”

From The Cincinnati Enquirer:

"In lieu of flowers or food, donations may be made to either the Andrea Cheng English as a Second Language Scholarship at Cincinnati State (online or checks to Attn: Cincinnati State Foundation, Cincinnati State Technical & Community College, ATLC, Room 352, 3520 Central Parkway, Cincinnati OH, 45223), or to the Cincinnati Public Library (online or checks to 800 Vine St. Cincinnati, OH 45202). Please note that the gift is in memory of Andrea Cheng."

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By John L. Amundsen
Program Officer,
Outreach and Communications ALA Office
for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services
for Cynthia Leitich Smith's Cynsations

The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Round Table (GLBTRT) family, along with all of ALA, are saddened to learn of the death of Larry Romans, director at large of the GLBTRT on Thursday.

His service to the Library community was vast; Larry served on the GLBTRT Executive Board for six years and had been a member of GLBTRT since 1984, when it was then known as the SRRT Task Force on Gay Liberation. He served on the ALA Executive Board from 2007-2010 and served with distinction on ALA Council for over 24 years. He was the the chapter councilor for Tennessee for eight years and was finishing his 16th year as an at large councilor at the time of his passing.

While on ALA Council, Larry was a forceful advocate for equality, within and beyond the Association. He worked with ALA staff to make its conferences more welcoming and inclusive environments for all, through ensuring that conference cities implement sensitivity training for employees in serving transgender attendees and sponsored a resolution opposing marriage inequality.

He often chaired ALA’s Resolutions Committee and was an informed participant whose opinions were valued. He helped many newly elected ALA Councilors find their way and their voice to speak their passion. Larry was a master of parliamentary procedure to follow in meetings. He could always be depended on to know who to talk to on specific issues.

Children's Award Winner

YA Award Winner

Through the generosity of Larry, and his husband Mike Morgan, the Stonewall Book Award Endowment fund grew significantly, with Larry and Mike donating over $75,000, including a $15,000 challenge match in 2014.

Endowing the Children’s and Young Adult Literature Award, which was named for Larry and Mike in 2012, was a highlight of his career.

“Larry Romans’ thoughtful and invaluable contributions to elevating GLBT literature; to the advancement of The American Library Association; and to librarianship will not be forgotten,” said ALA President Sari Feldman. “Larry will be missed and always in the hearts of his friends, colleagues, and those that look to the Stonewall Book Awards - Mike Morgan & Larry Romans Children’s & Young Adult Literature Award - for quality titles regarding the GLBT experience.”

Larry was a dear friend to many and will be remembered for his kind soul, gentle manner and deep wisdom. The GLBTRT membership and Executive Board will miss his counsel, his warmth and his friendship.

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The City of Gold and Lead is the second book in the Tripods series by John Christopher. I'm reposting my reviews in tribute to this great science fiction author who died this week.

Will and his friends have been living with the renegade community in the White Mountains, undergoing training to help in the battle against the Tripods. Now, volunteers are needed for a dangerous mission, and the three friends hope to be chosen. The volunteers will travel to a city in Germany to compete in the yearly athletic tournament. The winners of the tournament get the "honor" of going to the Tripod's city to serve the Tripods. If any of the volunteers win the tournament, they will have an opportunity to gather information from inside the Tripod's city. But this could well be a fatal mission; no one has ever returned from the Tripod's city. If they get into the city, will the heros be able to get back out again alive?

The first part of this book is a little slow but once the story gets going it's pretty exciting. In this book the fight against the Tripods, or the Masters as they are called in this book, becomes much more personal. Whereas in the first book they are a somewhat remote threat, with only a few close encounters, in this book we learn much more about the horrors of the Masters dominion over the Earth. The battle becomes much more real, and much more necessary. There are a couple of scenes in this book that may be too intense for sensitive children.


Buy The City of Gold and Lead

• From your local independent bookseller
• From Amazon.com
• From Barnes & Noble
• Audio book from Audible.com

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By Elizabeth Beck Neither Sarah nor I have met Troy Anthony Davis. I first met his family in about 2003, which was about 18 years into his death sentence when Sarah and I were working on In the Shadow of Death: Restorative Justice and Death Row Families. At the time, his sister

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By Suzanne Ryan, Music Editor

We bid a sad farewell to one of our most dear authors and friends, Bruce Haynes.

An Associate Professor at the Université de Montréal and McGill University, Bruce was a pioneer and champion of historical performance practice with numerous solo and ensemble recordings to his credit. He was a founding member of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, alongside his wife and musical partner, Susie Napper to whom we humbly offer our most sincere condolences.

As part of his long list of publications, Bruce authored two books with Oxford, The Eloquent Oboe: A History of the Hautboy from 1640-1760 (2001) and The End of Early Music: A Period Performer’s History of Music (2007) which received the ASCAP Deems Taylor Media Award, and he was a contributor to the New Grove Dictionary of Music.

Beloved and respected throughout the early music community, Bruce’s efforts and insights as both performer and scholar brought historical performance practice alive, and his legacy will enrich the ears and hearts of musicians and audiences for years to come. It was an honor, a privilege, and a joy to work with Bruce and to be witness to his grace, warmth, and generosity. Bruce passed from our midst on May 17^th, but his spirit will never leave our hearts.

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By Stanley Corkin

Sidney Lumet never won an academy award and was rarely placed in the company of the elite Hollywood directors, like Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola. Yet, his body of work suggests the need for a re-evaluation.  I have long appreciated Lumet’s mastery of his craft and particularly his ability to use New York’s urban landscape as a character in his films. But it was while working on my book Starring New York: Filming the Grime and Glamour of the Long 1970s that I gave him the attention that deepened my regard. Serpico (1973), and Dog Day Afternoon (1975) Prince of the City (1981), are prominently featured in my study, as is to a lesser degree, Network (1976).  In these films, as in so many others—The Pawnbroker (1964), Daniel (1980), The Verdict (1982), Q and A (1990)—Lumet shows his mastery of his craft, directing not with flash, but with a deep regard for his material. He never brings undue attention to his style; rather, in every shot he complicates our understanding of his characters and their complex relationships to each other and the world. I came to see that his vision of New York in the great films he directed in the 1970s was complexly historical and anthropological. In Network, the exterior shots of corporate headquarters of the various television networks say everything about the remoteness and shallow calculations of those businesses, and how they are definitional for a sector of New York City.  His montage that begins Dog Day Afternoon is an amazing short film in itself, tracking the geographic and social complexity of New York, as well as its points of contact—water, air, electronic—with a world beyond.  Lumet truly understood his city as it morphed into its post-modern incarnation, a city of uneven economic development, deeply involved in the moment of globalized trade and culture.

Stanley Corkin is Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati and author of Starring New York: Filming the Grime and the Glamour of the Long 1970s.

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Suzanne Ryan, Senior Editor, Music Books

Oxford University Press joins a large community of friends, colleagues, performers, and students in mourning the passing of Shirlee Emmons Baldwin, one of the most beloved and strongest voices in the education, nurturing, and career development of singers. Having been trained as a classical singer myself, it was with great pride that I “inherited” Shirlee’s three titles when I began work at the Press—Power Performance for Singers (1998), Prescriptions for Choral Excellence (with Constance Chase; 2006), and Researching the Song (with Wilbur Watkins Lewis; also 2006). Through these books and others, and in the hearts of all those she touched, Shirlee’s voice will continue to resound and enlighten.

I am pleased to be able to share these beautiful words from Maribeth Payne, former OUP music editor who worked most closely with Shirlee and who had a long-lasting friendship with her:

As an author, Shirlee was great to work with–attentive, timely, responsive, hard-working, fun. Her work was the foundation of the professional voice list at OUP. But she was also a lovely, warm, generous person and a friend. Her voice was so resonant, I always had to shut my door when she came to the office–but the sound still got through. Her laugh was infectious and a joy to hear. She was also enormously helpful to young singers, several of whom I sent her way for lessons long after she had stopped teaching at Barnard and Princeton. One young man is now pursuing a budding opera career in Germany. Her studio was always completely full, but she took these students anyway, simply because I asked her to do so. I will really miss her.

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Barbara Owen is a nationally-known expert in the areas of girls, women and crime, women-centered policy and women’s prison culture. She is currently developing research and policy on women’s issues in an international and human rights context. In the article below she remembers John Irwin who passed away on January 3rd.

John Irwin, a preeminent sociologist who focused his work on incarceration and its ongoing harm, passed away on January 3, 2010. While teaching sociology at San Francisco State University for 27 years, he produced an influential body of work that combined advocacy and rigorous research. He came to this work from a unique and informed perspective. Before receiving a PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley in 1968, he served five years in a California state penitentiary for armed robbery. His first book, The Felon, is a classic description of convict careers with the prison system. Following this landmark work, he has written about jails and the underclass, the decades of correctional and philosophical unrest in Prisons in Turmoil, and documented current dilemmas facing the correctional complex in, The Warehouse Prison and a just-published book on male lifers and their search for redemption.

Most recently, John Irwin was a lead author in the policy critique Unlocking America which calls for substantial reform of the US sentencing system. He was also a member of the Working Party for the American Friends Service Committee and contributed to the report, Struggle for Justice, a landmark in the prisoner rights world.

John Irwin was a founding father of two social and intellectual movements: The Prisoners Union which attempted to organize prisoners and gain recognition of their civil and political rights; and the Convict Criminology school of thought that examined imprisonment from the perspective of the academically-trained convict. While he inspired several generations of new scholars, this legacy of mentoring former prisoners to critically document and analyze the prison remains an enduring contribution to intellectual life in American criminology.

John Irwin was also very supportive of students and encouraged their work both verbally and by being positively critical of their work. Although it was 33 years ago, I can still remember his remarks on the first paper I submitted to him in my master’s level graduate program. He commented on the strengths and the weaknesses of my argument, improving both my work and my confidence to go on for my PhD. When he asked me to write the afterward to the OUP book, The Warehouse Prison, I was truly honored to have my work on women’s prisons included in a John Irwin book. I know that I would not have my career as a prison researcher without that support and encouragement. I suspect many criminologists feel the same.

John Irwin was a witness to over four decades of correctional practice by focusing on the lived experience of the imprisoned and questioning America’s approach to punishment. While he will be greatly missed by all of us who are committed to social justice, his legacy as a scholar and an advocate will continue to shape our work.

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Sarah Russo, Associate Director, Publicity, [email protected], http://twitter.com/sarahrusso

Years ago, I started my career in publicity as an assistant at Alfred A. Knopf. It was the ultimate place to learn about books, authors, the publishing industry, the “right” way to do things in the publicity world, the civilized way.

Every day started for me at 7:30am, cup of coffee in hand, the other assistant and I divided the morning papers and got to reading: The New York Times, Washington Post, Daily News, New York Post, Christian Science Monitor, Wall Street Journal, and several other big dailies. We read them all, devoured them is more like it, searching for mentions of Knopf books—clipping, pasting, photocopying; putting together the “clips packet,” arts & crafts for the publicity set—to circulate to sales, marketing, editorial, and the rest of the publicity department. Yes, there were that many mentions of Knopf books each day. The packet was huge, thirty, forty pages on most days, far more on Mondays when we received the Sunday papers from around the country.

The office was a rotating cast of celebrity authors and poets. Michael Crichton, V.S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison, Eli Wiesel, and celebrity editors: Ash Green, Gary Fisketjon, Deb Garrison, Judith Jones. If you don’t know Judith Jones’s name it’s only because she is the personification of a true editor: the person behind the scenes, never flashy, never usurping the true performers—the writers—she just made the books better. But you do know her work. She discovered Julia Child, and there is a story that’s told at Knopf that she is the person who discovered The Diary of Anne Frank in the slush pile as an assistant at HarperCollins Paris. She was, of course, John Updike’s editor. And their friendship was palpable.

One afternoon, I had the chance to spend the day in Judith’s office, overlooking the East River (as Knopf was then at 201 East 50th Street) with John Updike. As a publicity assistant part of my job was to help authors sign their books when they came in to the office. When they are being asked to sign 300 copies for the sales force having someone un-boxing books, opening them to the title page and packing them back up is a necessity. My job for the afternoon was to help and make polite conversation.

Learning to talk to famous people as a terribly shy, 22 year old was a painful process for me but Mr. Updike was a kind, generous person and full of conversation. And we had one thing in common: we’re both Dutch (or I am at least partly so). So we had the Netherlands to chat about. And as we were talking about Holland, Sijthoffs and Updikes, plugging through 300 copies of Gertrude & Claudius, a rainbow appeared over the East River. Truly, a rainbow. Utterly bucolic over the dingy buildings on the waterfront of Queens. And we just stood there, staring out the window, silent, surprised and smiling.

John Updike was a good man: an incredible writer, kind to the least important of publicity personnel, and a lover of words and the world. He will be missed.

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