Welcome to the first post in my 2015 monthly author series. For January I chose to read several works by Joseph Bruchac. He’s someone I have been wanting to read because of his Abenaki heritage and the fact that he writes about native protagonists. But more pressingly, he’s coming to speak in Sacramento at the beginning of February! I’m really excited to go to that event as he’ll be talking about diversity in children’s literature.

Bruchac is quite the Renaissance man when it comes to storytelling. He’s published a bajillion books (that’s an exact number), he sings and writes songs, and he does traditional oral storytelling. He is also involved with working to preserve Abenaki culture and language and traditional native skills. According to his biography, in addition Abenaki heritage he is also Slovokian and English. On a personal note this interested me because my husband, and therefore my daughter, are also part Slovak.

The schedule for this week will be reviews of several of his books. Bruchac has an extensive backlist that spans many genres and reading levels, which is fabulous for librarians. It also meant I couldn’t possibly tackle all his books. I think rather appropriately Multicultural Children’s Book Day falls on Tuesday (January 27th) and what better way to celebrate. Here’s the schedule for the week:

• Monday: Reviews of the picture books The First Strawberries, The Great Ball Game, Squanto’s Journey, and A Boy Called Slow
• Tuesday: Multicultural Children’s Book Day, Review of the kidlit novel  The Children of the Longhouse
• Wednesday: Review of the kidlit novel The Arrow Over the Door
• Thursday: Review of middle grade novels Dragon Castle  and Skeleton Man
• Friday: Review of the YA novel The Killer of Enemies

I will link to the posts once they are live.

Also here are a few links of note that you may be interested in:

• Joseph Bruchac’s official website
• An Interview with Multicultural Children’s Author Joseph Bruchac on the Multicultural Children’s Book Day blog from December 2014
• Second Annual Diversity Month Day 26: Author Interview with Joseph Bruchac on Twinja Book Reviews blog (awesome blog, btw) from December 2014
• Update 2/5/2015: Our local interest radio show interviewed Bruchac yesterday because he’ll be in town on Monday. It’s an interesting, short interview and worth a listen. Joseph Bruchac on Insight. When asked about diversity in children’s literature he said he now writes the stories he wished he had. Interestingly he notes that he heard a lot of stories from his native heritage, but they were oral stories not books, which he wanted. I was struck though, but the question, how many authors do we have to hear say they write the books they wished they had before publishers quite claiming that there is no market for diverse books?