The Bank Street Center for Children’s Literature Announces the Inaugural Dorothy Carter Writer-in-Residence: Kwame Alexander
Kwame Alexander, winner of the 2015 Newbery Medal for The Crossover, will be the Inaugural Dorothy Carter Writer-in-Residence.
Kwame Alexander will begin working with the 9- and 10-year-olds on their poetry curriculum in the Bank Street School for Children for six weeks, from early April through mid-May. Bank Street College is establishing an endowment to continue this residency in the name of Dorothy Carter, a children’s book author, a Broadway actress, the first African-American member of the Bank Street College graduate faculty, and a leader of the Bank Street Writers Lab. We lost Dr. Carter in 2012, but her legacy will live on through the Dorothy Carter Writer-in-Residence program.
It is fortuitous that Kwame Alexander will inaugurate this program–not only because he is the winner of the 2015 Newbery Medal, but also because his father, Dr. E. Curtis Alexander, who graduated from Bank Street College Graduate School of Education in 1970, worked directly with Dorothy Carter in the Harlem Institute for Teachers.
The Bank Street Community is thrilled that Kwame Alexander will be sharing his gifts with our students and teachers in the School for Children, the Graduate Faculty, and the New York City community at large.
Kwame Alexander will be kicking off his Dorothy Carter Writer-in-Residency with an evening event together with his father, Dr. E. Curtis Alexander, on Monday, April 6, 2015 from 6:30-7:30PM: Doing the Write Thing, 1969-2015: A Literary Legacy Conversation Between Kwame Alexander, 2015 Newbery Medalist, and his father, Dr. E. Curtis Alexander (GS ’70), moderated by Leonard S. Marcus, historian and author of Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon.
The Bank Street Center for Children’s Literature http://bankstreet.edu/center-childrens-literature/
Blog: https://bankstreetcollegeccl.wordpress.com/
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IrmaBlackAward
The mission of Bank Street College is to improve the education of children and their teachers. Bank Street seeks to strengthen not only individuals, but the community as well, including family, school, and the larger society, in which children and adults, in all their diversity, interact and learn. We see in education the opportunity to build a better society.www.bankstreet.edu.
The mission of the Center for Children’s Literature at Bank Street is to create, identify, and advocate for the highest quality literature for all children from infancy through adolescence. We ensure that such literature is readily accessible to every child, and to foster in parents, educators, and policy makers a commitment to the principle that good literature is fundamental to literacy. The Center will provide workshops, guides and content for learning and social-emotional/aesthetic development at all levels of childhood education.
The components of the Center are the Children’s Book Committee, Irma Simonton and James H. Black Award, BookFest @ Bank Street, and the Writers Lab. The Center is housed in the Bank Street College Library. The Library has a circulating collection of over 68,000 children’s books, the Claudia Lewis reference research collection, as well as curriculum materials for teacher.
