Whitney and I visited four different classes at Drummond Thomas Montessori School in Chicago last Wednesday morning. After I told one class that even when my eyes are open, all I see is the color black, one preschooler wondered, “Then how do you know when you’re tired?” I can tell you this much: I’m pretty […]
Gangs. Drugs. Violence. Poverty. Those were my lingering images of Chicago’s housing projects after they were torn down a decade or so ago. I know a lot more about the history of those projects and the people who lived in them now, though, thanks to my friend Audrey Petty, an Associate Professor of English at […]
Heard the one about the deaf girl showing up at the Blind woman’s doorstep? In our case, this was not a joke. I’m trying to slowly get back into the swing of things, so I stuck with a plan to have 20-plus students from a disability studies class at DePaul University come visit last Thursday. […]
Whitney and I had a ball at the Youth Literature Festival in Champaign last week, and the highlight of the entire event was meeting Kayla, a delightful second grader at Westview Elementary School. I usually don’t let kids pet Whitney when she has her harness on, but this was an exception. Kayla is blind, and she’d […]
Tomorrow morning Whitney and I head to Skokie for a “Mix ‘n Mingle” at National Louis University. Twenty children’s book authors have been invited to display our wares to school librarians who’ll be there, and before the mingling starts we each get one minute to stand by our table and give a summary of what […]