Award-winning authors to be featured at literature conference

Four award-winning authors will be guests of honor at an all-day conference on international children’s and young people’s literature on Saturday, Nov. 18.

The conference, “Open a Door … Open a Book … Open Your Mind … to the World,†now in its sixth year, is the only conference of its kind in Wisconsin, drawing international children’s literature enthusiasts from around the state.

Authors Yangsook Choi, Cathryn Clinton, Yona Zeldis McDonough and Suzanne Fisher Staples will speak at the conference. Each author has published extensively and are recognized. Also featured at the conference will be Ginny Moore Kruse, former director of UW–Madison’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center and an international authority on children’s literature.

The conference, to be held at the Memorial Union beginning at 8:15 a.m. on Nov. 18, is an initiative of UW–Madison’s Wisconsin International Outreach Consortium (WIOC), a consortium of federally funded Title VI national resource centers, including eight on the UW–Madison campus. Since the conference’s inception in 2002, authors from around the world have addressed more than 500 teachers, librarians, students and literature enthusiasts from Wisconsin, Minnesota and Illinois.

A related event featuring three of the authors and Wisconsin’s first lady, Jessica Doyle, will take place on Friday, Nov. 17. For the past three years, Doyle has included the conference’s authors in her “Read On Wisconsin†program by selecting a book by each author for her reading lists and inviting students for book discussions with the authors. This year Doyle will welcome three of the authors — Choi (“The Name Jarâ€), Clinton (“A Stone in My Handâ€) and Fisher Staples (“Under the Persimmon Treeâ€) — to the governor’s mansion.

This event is open to the public, but registration and a fee are required. For more information, contact Rachel Weiss at 262-9224 or rweiss@wisc.edu, or visit http://www.wioc.wisc.edu/.