Naomi C. Chase lecture in children’s literature 2023
THE POWER OF INSISTING ON IN-BETWEENThe Chase Lecture honors the memory of Dr. Naomi Chase, a classroom teacher who became professor at the University of Minnesota, and was especially passionate about empowering children as readers and writers.
There are now more mixed race children than at any point in American history. Trans kids are fighting their ongoing era- sure, bathroom by bathroom, banned book by banned book. And cross-genre writing for kids just keeps popping up. What do all these things have in common? They exist at the intersections of identity, culture, and power. This talk will explore the generative possibilities of insisting on the in-between when we tell stories of and for children.
The 2023 Chase Lecture featured Shannon Gibney
Shannon Gibney is a writer, educator, activist, and the author of See No Color (Carolrhoda Lab, 2015), and Dream Country (Dutton, 2018) young adult novels that won Minnesota Book Awards in 2016 and 2019. Gibney is faculty in English at Minneapolis College, where she teaches writing. A Bush Artist and McKnight Writing Fellow, her new novel, The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be, explores themes of transracial adoption through speculative memoir (Dutton, 2023). Gibney’s other upcoming publications include the picture books Sam and the Incredible African and American Food Fight (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), and Where We Come From (Lerner, 2022; coauthored), and a YA anthology of stories by adoptees about adoptees, co-edited with Nicole Chung (HarperTeen, 2023).