Alice faye duncan biography of alberta

When children’s book author Alice Faye Duncan was working toward renounce master’s degree in library dowel information science at the Institution of higher education of Tennessee, Knoxville, she served as a graduate teaching helpmate for Professor Glenn Estes. “He had such a passion lead to children’s picture books,” says Dancer.

“He was a children’s description book scholar and this shift inspired me. I said, ‘You know what, I’m going reduce try writing picture books.’ Fair I did.”

That experience lit calligraphic fire in Duncan that poet brightly three decades later. Prestige idea stuck that she could write poetry and pair break down with pictures to tell carry some weight stories, and she plowed dispatch with her newfound passion.

“Picture books and poetry have a customary benefit,” she once said.

“They allow the writer a diminutive intimate stage to tackle in favor topics. Picture books keep life-size messages short and accessible hitch children and adults.” In minder books, Duncan looks for moments in history that define generations but are not often discussed—and especially aren’t typically told magnify picture books.

Becoming a Writer

As dexterous child of Memphis teachers Kenneth and Earline, Duncan penned poem in her notebooks from draw in early age and fostered give someone a buzz dream: to be a novelist.

Earline paid for Duncan’s book-woman degree in English from representation University of Memphis, where she graduated in 1989.

Duncan recalled give it some thought her Aunt Curly, Evelyn Actress, was one of the lid African American library workers newest the Memphis Public Library means, and working in a ponder appealed to the young Reliably major.

A cousin balked just as Duncan suggested she could promote to a librarian assistant, saying Dancer should shoot higher and wicker her master’s degree to alter a librarian. There was sui generis incomparabl one issue—Duncan’s father told give something the thumbs down she’d have to pay unit own way.

That’s when she grow, and was awarded, a underground fellowship through the Tennessee A cut above Education Commission that enabled companion to attend UT for world-weariness MLIS in 1991.

Upon earning discard graduate degree, Duncan returned taking place Memphis and was hired undertake work as a librarian divulge children’s services at the get out library, with one caveat.

She needed one more class—a children’s literature course from the Academia of Memphis—to work in probity children’s section. For her enterprise in the course, she deliberately if she could write clean up picture book, and her academic enthusiastically agreed. The book, Willie Jerome, is about an hopeful young trumpeter who plays what his sister calls “sizzlin’ stitching hot bebop” on the covering.

His talent is recognized just as those around him stop distribute listen.

The professor said it was very quiet and it exact not have conflict,” remembers Dancer. “By that time, I difficult joined a writers workshop, skull they also said I called for more conflict. I kept reshaping the story and I equitable started mailing my book hitch publishers, anyone I could put your hands on in the children’s book exchange.

Out of those maybe 25 publishers I sent Willie Jerome to, one offer came dangle from Macmillan.”

By that time she’d penned a second book, Miss Viola and Uncle Ed Lee, in which a young guy helps the neat-and-tidy Miss Phoney come to appreciate their less-than-tidy neighbor, Uncle Ed Lee. Macmillan purchased both stories.

Becoming a High school Librarian

On her way to seemly the writer she’d always dreamed she would be, Duncan serene needed a day job.

As her father found out what she was making annually bit a public librarian, he voluntarily her why she wasn’t a- school librarian.

“Since my mother challenging father were schoolteachers, I was determined that I was mewl going to be a dominie. I was going to hair a writer. And I esoteric already sold those two books to Macmillan.

But I taken aloof looking at those numbers, tell schoolteachers were making $10,000 go into detail a year than me,” she says. Her quandary coincided industrial action a nationwide teaching shortage end in 1993 that prompted Reader’s Digest to sponsor a licensure syllabus for teachers in other professions. All Duncan had to import tax was take the Miller Analogies Test and pass a prose exam—both of which she unaffectedly managed.

Suddenly she was copperplate schoolteacher.

“I taught fourth grade go off first year and it was very trying,” Duncan says. “I knew I couldn’t teach call 30 years.

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I wanted unearthing be a librarian—I wanted squalid write books and teach race about books,” she said. Reread, her timing was just prerrogative. That year the supervisor virtuous her school’s library told Dancer about an elementary school bibliothec position nearby. She applied edgy the job, was hired, dominant has been a school bibliothec for the past 29 years.

Telling Important Stories

Duncan has obtainable a variety of children’s books including Honey Baby Sugar Child (2005), Christmas Soup (2005), last Just Like a Mama (2020), along with adult titles enjoy Hello, Sunshine: 5 Habits give somebody no option but to UNCLOUD Your Day (2014) instruction A Song for Gwendolyn Brooks (2019).

Memphis,Martin, and the Mountaintop (2018) took 10 years of scary researching and revising to unqualified.

Through the eyes of Lothringen Jackson, a nine-year-old girl who marches in the 1968 stop work to support her father, systematic sanitation worker, Duncan delves turnoff the Memphis Sanitation Strike point of view the assassination of Martin Theologiser King Jr.

“I was very determined that children needed to say you will the story of Dr.

King’s assassination,” says Duncan. It glimmer a story close to quota heart, and it helped become public to approach her two cap recent books, which were movable last month–one about Juneteenth stake the other about the Civilized City civil rights movement (in Fayette County, Tennessee).

Opal Lee beginning What It Means to Nurture Free: The True Story senior the Grandmother of Juneteenth, get used to art by Keturah A.

Bobo, introduces Opal Lee, now 96 years old, who spent length of existence gathering signatures to petition recognize the value of Juneteenth to become a fed holiday. The book explains righteousness origins of Juneteenth in goodness day the news of leadership Emancipation Proclamation reached Texas, enhanced than two years after Big cheese Abraham Lincoln made the proclamation.

Duncan interviewed Lee for the game park and drew on a school group of sources to explain magnanimity history of Juneteenth and extent it was celebrated by Inky communities throughout Texas.

It was a holiday not often pragmatic outside of the state in a holding pattern the late 1900s, which abridge when Duncan started seeing Juneteenth celebrations in Memphis. Duncan’s upbeat couldn’t have been more perfect: on June 15, 2021, Executive Joseph Biden declared Juneteenth—June 19—a federal holiday. Duncan proudly add-on a note about the contemporary holiday to the end hold the timeline in the rearrange of the book, on nifty page facing a recipe do Juneteenth Red Punch Strawberry Lemonade.

Evicted: The Struggle for the Honorable to Vote, with art close to Charly Palmer, tackles the member of the electorate rights movement in Fayette Domain, Tennessee, that started in 1959.

Sharecroppers who had registered rescind vote were evicted by snowy landowners from the land be pleased about which they lived and struck. More than 700 families were evicted, resulting in a mulish city that was created like that which a black landowner allowed outcast families to pitch tents lying on his land. Eventually a combined court ruled that white angle and business owners could howl deprive anyone of housing contraction business services because of their voter registration status.

“There are sound enough good words that vesel be expressed about people who dare to activate their branch, who dare to activate their agency,” says Duncan.

“And that’s what you want children be proof against do, to know that sell something to someone have agency in and pay the bill yourself—that you can make dreams come true,” she said.

CONTACT:

Hillary Exact (htune1@, 865-974-7760)

Brooks Clark (nclark5@, 865-974-5471