When I was a boy, elementary schools did not have libraries. We didn’t know what we were missing because our town had a Carnegie Library. Beginning in 1889, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie built homes for books. Eventually his philanthropy erected 2,509 public libraries, two-thirds of which were in the United States. The one in my […]
Category Archives: Literature/Books
Admitting Writers and Artists to Harvard
November 30, 2012 – 11:07 am
The following essay is taken without alteration from Harvard Magazine’s current issue. I reprint it without comment because its clarity and persuasiveness require none. Read and reflect. * * * * * Porter University Professor Helen Vendler, a preeminent poetry critic, has served on Harvard College’s undergraduate admissions committee. Given contemporary admissions processes and pressures, […]
Cheesie Mack in “Publishers Weekly”
March 31, 2012 – 12:29 pm
My first book, Cheesie Mack Is Not a Genius or Anything, was released by Random House Children’s Books almost exactly one year ago. Since then I have visited over 80 schools across the country…in Massachusetts (Cheesie lives in Gloucester), New York, California, Oklahoma, Nevada, Florida, Washington, Idaho, and I can’t remember where else. Kids love […]
Two Lives in a Small Town
February 9, 2012 – 6:22 pm
The following, in Shonnie Brown’s “Neighbors” column, appeared in The Healdsburg Tribune, our local weekly, on February 9, 2012. [Most of the images were not in the original.] * * * * * Ann, born and raised in Casper, Wyoming, has the dubious distinction of attending high school with both Dick and Lynne Cheney and […]
Cheesie Mack: Back Home in Massachusetts
September 22, 2011 – 3:43 pm
Cheesie returns to his home state in a couple of days for a two-week whirlwind of book events. The lad “lives” in Gloucester, so of course I’ll be speaking at two elementary schools there, as well as schools, both public and private, in Cambridge, Arlington, Newton, Sutton, Millbury, and Auburn. Plus libraries in Easton, and […]
Ruth Lilly Fellowships in Poetry — 2011
September 5, 2011 – 9:20 pm
The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, and “an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture,” has announced the five recipients of Ruth Lilly Fellowships for 2011. My son, Theodore Zachary Cotler, was one of the winners. Quoting from the Poetry Foundations’s website: The editors of Poetry magazine selected […]
A Return to Kamala School
May 14, 2011 – 10:38 pm
I was in Southern California all last week hopping from bookstores to schools in an exhausting and exhilarating schedule of 22 Cheesie Mack book events and two Pobba concerts. All were fun and rewarding, but one visit, a spur-of-the-moment trip back in time, stood out. In September 1952, Oxnard’s Kamala School (K-6) opened to students. […]
Cheesie Mack on Sale Today
March 22, 2011 – 4:58 pm
Several years ago I had an idea for a book about an active, inquisitive ten-year-old boy. His name was Ronald Mack, but his friends all called him Cheesie. I envisioned him as full of life, talkative, smart, and funny…exactly the kind of youngster who’d get into complicated kid situations that would require clever kid thinking […]
Mark Twain and the N-word
January 11, 2011 – 11:55 pm
Recently, NewSouth Books announced the publication of a new version of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Bowdlerized by Auburn University’s Dr. Alan Gribben, Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, is described by NewSouth thusly: In a radical departure from standard editions, Twain’s most famous novels are published here as the continuous narrative that the author […]
Charlie Chan: Chinaman or Chinese Man
October 13, 2010 – 11:13 pm
In the October 28, 2010, issue of The New York Review of Books, Richard Bernstein reviews Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History by Yunte Huang. As a child of the first television generation—I was six when we got ours in 1950—I devoured Laurel and Hardy, The […]
