YA Author CHRIS CRUTCHER to Speak at
In Search of Wonder: Common Core and More
In Search of Wonder: Common Core and More
October 17th in Perry, Ohio
The National Children's Book and Literacy Alliance is thrilled to announce that esteemed author for young adults Chris Crutcher will be joining Katherine Paterson, Nikki Grimes, Steven Kellogg, and Tanya Lee Stone as a keynote speaker for In Search of Wonder: Common Core and More, an interdisciplinary, professional development day designed for educators, librarians, parents, and students of education and library science to be held October 17 in Perry, Ohio. Together we will share information about new and classic fiction and nonfiction literature that can be used in the classroom across a variety of academic disciplines ~ a semester’s worth of information in one day! 
Chris Crutcher was raised in Cascade,
Idaho, a lumber and cattle ranch town located in the central Idaho
Rockies, a two hour drive over treacherous two-lane from the nearest
movie theater and a good forty minutes from the nearest bowling alley.
In high school he played football, basketball and ran track, not because
he was a stellar athlete, but because in a place so isolated, every
able bodied male was heavily recruited. “If you didn’t show up on the
first day of football practice your freshman year,” he says, “they just
came to your house and got you. And your parents let them in.” His early
interest in stories came principally from reading Jean Shepherd and
other fine authors in the Playboy Magazine delivered monthly to his
house because, as he overheard his father saying to his mother, “Some of
the very finest contemporary American literature graces the pages of
that magazine.” Full disclosure, there is justified suspicion that he
may have perused some of the photography before settling down to serious
reading. Crutcher’s years as teacher, then director, of a K-12 alternative school in Oakland, California through the nineteen-seventies, and his subsequent twenty-odd years as a therapist specializing in child abuse and neglect, inform his thirteen novels and two collections of short stories. “I have forever been intrigued by the extremes of the human condition,” he says, “the remarkable juxtaposition of the ghastly and the glorious. As Eric ‘Moby’ Calhoun tells us at the conclusion of Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, ‘Ain’t it a trip where heroes come from’.” He has also written what he calls an ill-advised autobiography titled King of the Mild Frontier, which was designated by “Publisher’s Weekly” as “the YA book most adults would have read if they knew it existed.”
Chris has received a number of coveted awards, from his high school designation as “Most Likely to Plagiarize” to the American Library Association’s Margaret A. Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award. His favorites are his two Intellectual Freedom awards, one from the National Council for Teachers of English and the other from the National Coalition Against Censorship. Five of Crutcher’s books appeared on an American Library Association list of the 100 Best Books for Teens of the Twentieth Century (1999 to 2000). A recent NPR list of the Best 100 YA and Children’s books included none of those titles. Time flies. Crutcher no longer listens to, nor contributes to, NPR.
Learn more about Crutcher and his books on his website ChrisCrutcher.com.
To learn more about In Search of Wonder and to register, click here.
