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Why is good children's literature so powerful, so magical?

 
Tim Myers is a writer, songwriter, storyteller, and university lecturer in English.

His Glad to Be Dad:  A Call to Fatherhood (Familius) is in both e-book and print form; it was featured on Parents Magazine’s website, Disney’s BabyZone, and won the Ben Franklin Digital Award.  His full-length Dear Beast Loveliness:  Poems of the Body (BlazeVox) earned an excellent review from poet Grace Cavalieri.  He's placed numerous pieces in top children's magazines (Cricket, AppleSeeds, Storyworks, New Moon), and has 11 children's books out (and three in press), which have won a number of awards and honors.  These include excellent reviews from Kirkus, SLJ, Booklist, and The New York Times, a short stint on The New York Times bestseller list for children's books, and adaptations of his works for drama and dance; in addition, Basho and the Fox was read aloud on NPR and Basho and the River Stones was one of three nominees for a California Young Readers medal.  Tim won the 2012 SCBWI Magazine Merit Award for Fiction.  He's also published a great deal of other fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.  He's placed over 120 poems (Rattle, Northeast, South Carolina Review, Southern Humanities Review, national anthologies), once won a national poetry contest judged by John Updike, and has a chapbook out from Pecan Grove Press, That Mass at Which the Tongue Is Celebrant.  He’s been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes.  As a fantasy/science fiction writer, he won a prize in the Writers of the Future Contest, and his work has appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Worlds of Fantasy and Horror, Space & Time, Weird Tales, Abyss & Apex, Futures Mysterious, on the Astropoetica website, and elsewhere. 
     
Tim spent 14 years as a classroom teacher in the States and overseas (Norway, London, Tokyo), has 20 years of university experience, and has been a professional storyteller for over 25 years.
     
His wife, Dr. M. Priscilla Myers, a reading specialist, teaches at Silicon Valley's Santa Clara University (where Tim also teaches), his older son is a professor at CU in Boulder, his younger has a Masters in Literature and is currently fighting forest fires, and his daughter is a book-gluttonous comparative lit. graduate from the University of California at Berkeley.
     
None of this, however, is nearly as noteworthy to most people as finding out that Tim is the oldest of eleven children.


Tim in this YouTube interview shares how can the complexities and force of great language and art be presented to young readers.  How do we best use the master-power of Story itself to enrich not only the lives of children but our whole culture as well.
 
 "The Better Part"--it's on YouTube here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Iz27TcQK6A

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