The 4th annual lecture of the Sarah Marwil Lamstein Children's Literature Lecture featured Chris Van Allsburg. Van Allsburg, author of The Polar Express and many other children's books, spoke about his career as artist, book illustrator and children's author. Van Allsburg is a true luminary in the children's book world. He has twice received the Caldecott Medal, for The Polar Express and for Jumanji, as well as a Caldecott Honor for his very first book, The Garden of Abdul Gasazi. He has also been awarded the Regina Medal for lifetime achievement in children's literature. A masterful artist with a talent for unique perspectives and provocative realities, Van Allsburg also has a playful side. Each of his sixteen books features an appearance by Fritz, a bull terrier. Van Allsburg slyly inserts Fritz, based on a dog once owned by his brother-in-law, into each story, sometimes as a dog but other times as a toy, a pitcher, or a child's drawing.  Van Allsburg lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife and two children. For more information, visit www.polarexpress.com or www.chrisvanallsburg.com.

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The second annual Sarah Marwil Lamstein Children's Literature Lecture featured Daniel Handler. Daniel Handler is the author of the novels The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth and Adverbs, and serves as the legal, literary and social representative of Lemony Snicket, whose sequence of books for children, known collectively as A Series Of Unfortunate Events, have allegedly sold more than 56 million copies in 39 languages and are indirectly responsible for at least one major motion picture. 

For reasons unknown even to himself, he works intermittently in film, journalism and music, including a collaboration with composer Nathaniel Stookey on a piece commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony entitled The Composer Is Dead.  The adjunct accordionist for the pop group The Magnetic Fields, Mr. Handler lives in San Francisco with his wife, the illustrator Lisa Brown, and a relatively small child.

For more information on the Lemony Snicket series of books, please visit the author's website: http://www.lemonysnicket.com/

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Jamie O'Neill, Irish writer and author of AT SWIM, TWO BOYS (2002), reads from his novel at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo on November 15, 2005. O'Neill was in the middle of a week-long residency in Ann Arbor, sponsored by the Lesbian-Gay-Queer Research Initiative at U-M's Institute for Research on Women and Gender, by the English Dept's Zell Visiting Writers Series, and by a grant from the Arcus Foundation.

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