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"Open a Door... Open a Book...
Open your Mind to the World"8th Annual International Children's Literature
and Young Adult Literature CelebrationSaturday, November 21, 2009
Memorial Union, Madison, WIAbout the Authors
Sylviane Diouf 
Sylviane A. Diouf is an award-winning historian. She received a doctorate from the University of Paris and has taught at New York University. She is the author of several academic books which have won critical acclaim and historical prizes, such as Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America (2007). Diouf has written books for younger readers, including the award-winning Kings and Queens of West Africa (2000); and her only fiction book, Bintou’s Braids(2001) published in the U.S., France, and Brazil. Born in France, Diouf has lived in Gabon, Senegal, Italy, and now resides in New York.
Rachna Gilmore 
Rachna Gilmore is an award winning, critically acclaimed Canadian author, who was born in New Delhi, India. She lived in Mumbai until the age of fourteen, when she moved to London, England with her family, and upon completion of her bachelor’s degree, settled in Canada. Rachna is the author of nineteen books, many of which reflect her cultural roots in India, explore and bear witness to the immigrant experience, and celebrate cultural diversity. Her titles include the picture books Lights for Gita, Roses for Gita and A Gift for Gita; the middle grade novel, Mina’s Spring of Colors, and the YA novel, A Group of One. Her most recent book is the middle-grade novel, The Trouble with Dilly. Rachna’s books have won numerous awards and honors, including the Governor General’s Award in Canada, a Jane Addams Honor Citation, and have been recommended on several reading lists. Rachna lives in Ottawa, where she continues to plark (play, work, lark) at writing weird and wonder-filled tales. Rachna Gilmore's website.
Kelly Herold 
Kelly Herold did her undergraduate work at the University of California at Berkeley, receiving a B.A. in Slavic Languages and Literatures and History in 1989. She earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures in 1998 at UCLA and has been teaching at Grinnell College since that year. Her research interests include Russian French-language memoir literature (1750-1830), the works of Vladimir Nabokov, and Russian children’s literature in Russia and abroad. She is currently writing on Baba Yaga in Anglo-American picture books and on Russian translations of Western Young Adult fiction.
At Grinnell, Kelly teaches all levels of the Russian Language, Russian Literature in Translation (The Russian Novel, Tolstoy, and Nabokov) and “Introduction to General Linguistics.” Kelly will begin teaching a special topics course on children's literature in 2010-2011. Kelly runs a Young Adult fiction reading group with her 2008 tutorial students, a group that will be open to other Grinnell students in Spring 2010. Kelly also writes and reviews Middle Grade and Young Adult fiction.
James Rumford 
James Rumford has studied more than a dozen languages and worked in the Peace Corps, where he traveled to Africa, Asia, and Afghanistan. He is the author-illustrator of Sequoyah: The Cherokee Man Who Gave His People Writing, a 2005 Sibert Honor Book; Calabash Cat and His Amazing Journey; Traveling Man: The Journey of Ibn Battuta 1325-1354; and There's a Monster in the Alphabet. His most recent book, Silent Music: A Story of Baghdad, has won numerous awards. He lives in Hawaii.