Rabbit Hill Literature Festival

Westport Public Library celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Rabbit Hill Festival of Literature from October 21-23. This year's festival will focus on the theme of collaboration, the magical process that occurs when authors and artists work closely together or when a pair of writers and/or illustrators works side-by-side to create a single book.

On Friday evening at 6:30 pm, there is a dinner with the authors at The Red Barn Restaurant in Westport. This is a unique opportunity to talk with the authors in a relaxed setting. The cost of $35 per person includes gratuity, and pre-registration is required. Reservations are limited.

On Saturday, October 23 at 9:00 am at the Saugatuck Elementary School, all of the authors and illustrators will talk about their collaborative work and the process of collaboration. In the afternoon, there will be small group lectures by each of the collaborative pairs.

At 3:30 pm, there will be autographing by all of the authors and illustrators, at which adults and children will have the opportunity to meet and chat with the authors. Books will be for sale throughout the day.

In conjunction with the festival, an exhibit entitled "Four from Westport: Celebrating the 10th Anniversary of the Rabbit Hill Children's Book Festival" will be on view from October 1-November 30 in the Library's Great Hall and feature original work by Westport artists Leonard Everett Fisher, Hardie Gramatky, Victoria Kann, and Hans Wilhelm. 

Registration is required. For more information and to register, go to www.westportlibrary.org or email Joan Hume at jhume@westportlibrary.org.

This year's featured authors and illustrators, whose books are intended for elementary-school readers, include the collaborative pairs of Lucia Gonzalez and Lulu Delacre, Betsy and Ted Lewin, Kate and Jim McMullan, and Andrea Davis Pinkney and Brian Pinkney as well as author Pegi Deitz Shea, who has worked closely with a different illustrator on each of her books. At this year's opening event, writer Emma Walton Hamilton will talk about the collaborative process of writing children's books with her mother, the singer and actress Julie Andrews.

Born and raised in Cuba, Lucia Gonzalez is a children's librarian, author, and storyteller currently living in Florida, where she has worked at public libraries in Miami-Dade and Broward counties. She collaborated on her three books with Puerto Rican-born illustrator Lulu Delacre, who studied art in Paris and now lives in Maryland. Their book, The Storyteller's Candle, about the New York's first Latino librarian, won the Pura Belpré honor award for writing and illustration. Their classic Cuban folk tale The Bossy Gallito also received the Pura Belpre honor award as well as being selected for The New York Times Top 20 All-Time Favorite Children's Books.

The award-winning, Brooklyn-based wife-and-husband team of Betsy and Ted Lewin participated in the very first Rabbit Hill Festival in 2001. They have created many books separately but, for this year's festival, will focus on their collaborative work based on travels to exotic places around the world. Their Gorilla Walk and Elephant Quest have long been favorites, while Balarama: A Royal ElephantHorse Song, about the Naadam festival in Mongolia, are among their most recent joint projects.      and

Betsy Lewin can't remember ever wanting to be anything but an artist. Many of her books have been New York Times (NYT) bestsellers, and her awards include a silver medal from the Society of Illustrators and a Caldecott Honor award for Click, Clack, Moo; Cows That Type by Doreen Cronin. Ted Lewin, too, always knew he wanted to be an illustrator and, after initially illustrating for adventure magazines, turned to focus entirely on illustrating and writing children's books. Among his numerous awards are The Hamilton King Award from the Society of Illustrators and a Caldecott Honor award for Peppe the Lamplighter by Elisa Bartone. His autobiographical book, I Was A Teenage Professional Wrestler, was an American Library Association (ALA) Notable book.

Husband-and-wife team Kate and Jim McMullan from Long Island have created many award-winning titles separately but have also collaborated on six picture books for young children to date, including I Stink!, about a garbage truck, and three follow-ups, I'm Dirty!, I'm Mighty!, and I'm Bad! 

Kate McMullan began her professional life as an elementary-school teacher in inner-city Los Angeles and, in 1976, became a language-arts editor for a New York City publisher. A year later, she published her first children's book and, since then, has written (under various monikers) more than 50 books for children, including the imaginative "Dragon Slayers' Academy" series. This year she won a ALA Geisel Honor award for Pearl and Wagner. She teaches writing for children at New York University's School of Continuing and Professional Education and is on the faculty of the New School's MFA Writing Program.

Jim McMullan was born in Tsingtao, China. After his father's death, he and his mother emigrated first to Canada and later to the U.S. In 1979, the McMullans married and had a daughter a year later. As a new father, Jim became interested in illustrating books and soon produced, with his wife, their first collaborative book, The Noisy Giant's Tea Party. In addition to illustrating books for other writers, which have brought him a number of awards, he designs and illustrates posters for Lincoln Center Theater productions and also teaches life drawing at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

The New York City husband-and-wife team of writer Andrea David Pinkney and illustrator Brian Pinkney has appeared at Rabbit Hill several times but never before together. Their collaboration has produced books about legendary entertainers—Duke Ellington (a Caldecott Honor Book), Alvin Ailey, and Ella Fitzgerald—while their newest picture book focuses on an important moment if the civil rights movement, Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood Up by Sitting Down.     

Connecticut-bred, Andrea Davis Pinkney is the daughter of parents deeply involved in the civil rights movement, which played a large role in her childhood and visibly influenced many of her books. In addition to writing accessible, brief biographies of people who followed their dreams, she has penned more than a dozen children's books, including Let It Shine: Stories of Black Women Freedom Fighters, winner of the 2001 Coretta Scott King Author Award. She also works as an executive editor at Scholastic, Inc., in New York.

Brian Pinkney is the acclaimed illustrator of many award-winning picture books, which have brought him two Caldecott Honors, four Coretta Scott King Honors, a Coretta Scott King Medal, and the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award. He has been exhibited at The Art Institute of Chicago, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, The Detroit Institute of Art, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The School of Visual Arts, and The Society of Illustrators.

New York City residents Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Hu have worked collaboratively as an illustration team since their marriage in 1988. He is an African-American native New Yorker, who was trained in commercial art and worked in advertising for a number of years. She was born and raised in Taiwan, came to the U.S. to study art education, and taught fine art in the New York public schools. Together and individually they have created beautiful, evocative pictures for dozens of children's books, among them, Princess Grace by Mary Hoffman and the adventures of true historical figures such as York, the only black man on the Lewis and Clark expedition in Laurence Pringle's American Slave, American Hero. Many of their titles have appeared on the lists of Notable Social Studies Trade Books, Notable Books for a Global Society, and the Bank Street College of Education Books of the Year.

Pegi Deitz Shea is a Connecticut resident, wife and mother, chef, landscaper, dog trainer, and award-winning author of 15 children's books. She teaches writing for children at the University of Connecticut and also through the Institute of Children's Literature. Working with a different illustrator on each of her picture books, she has created a unique body of work covering many multicultural topics and historical eras—The Whispering Cloth, for example, illustrated by Anita Riggio, is about a Southeast Asian refugee who expresses her painful past through traditional needlework, while her Noah Webster: Weaver of Words looks at a historical figure and named an Orbis Pictus honor book for top nonfiction by the National Council of Teachers of English in 2009.

The festival opens on Thursday, October 21, at 7:30 pm in Westport Public Library's McManus Room with a talk by author Emma Walton Hamilton on her collaboration with her mother, actress and singer Julie Andrews, on a number of children's books and also about her own book, Raising Bookworms: Getting Kids Reading for Pleasure and Empowerment.

On Friday, October 22, each of the authors will spend the day in the Westport Middle Schools speaking to students and teachers. One of the authors will spend the day at the Longfellow School in Bridgeport.

Also on Friday morning at 10:00 am, there will be a tour of the Weston Woods Studios located in Norwalk, CT. For more than 50 years, the studio has produced and distributed motion pictures based on outstanding children's books, and has won numerous awards and honors for their work. The tour leaves from the upper entrance of the Westport Public Library.

On Friday afternoon at 3:00 pm in the Library's McManus Room, Sharon McQueen, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will talk about her upcoming Robert Lawson's Biography: The Collaboration of the Scholar and the Family Historian, which provides the most in-depth look ever at this titan of children's literature and includes extensive information gleaned from interviews with Lawson Family members. She'll also present her new findings, including never-before published Robert Lawson art. 

The festival is for adults and attracts educators, librarians, and writers from all over Connecticut as well as New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. Except for the cost for the dinner and lunch, the festival is free. Teachers will receive .1CEUs for each event.