My primary goal as a doctoral candidate in the College of Information is to gain the expertise to contribute unique knowledge to the field of international literature for youth, my long-term area of interest and one of increasing importance in a global society. My affiliation with I-CELTIC will facilitate this process and provide opportunities to work with a stellar group of researchers engaged with youth and literature.

I bring recognized expertise in international youth literature to I-CELTIC. I was selected to serve on the 2007-2008 Mildred L. Batchelder Award Committee of the American Library Association; the Batchelder Award honors the publisher of the year’s best children’s book translation. I have been on the editorial board of Bookbird, the refereed journal of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY). I had a work-study scholarship to the International Youth Library in Munich. I was twice nominated by the Canadian section of IBBY (but, sadly, not appointed) to the Hans Christian Andersen jury; the Andersen Prize is the most prestigious international children’s literature award.  Another related achievement is The Looking Glass (www.the-looking-glass.net), an online international children’s literature journal that I helped found and edited for five years while working as a children’s and young adult librarian for Toronto Public Library and Miami-Dade Public Library. I have also developed and co-taught, with Dr. Dresang, a graduate course in international children’s literature at FSU. My goal is to work as an assistant professor at a research-intensive university where I can continue my scholarly investigations, train librarians to work with youth, and contribute to librarianship.

I am currently involved with two projects. The first is my dissertation research, “Found in Translation,” a mixed methods exploration of the decision-making process by which U.S. children’s acquisitions editors select books from other countries to translate for the U.S. market. This is important because relatively few children’s books in the U.S. are translations, and there is little research that documents how editors make these publishing decisions. The second, a research collaboration with Dr. Melissa Gross and fellow doctoral student Debi Carruth, is the “HIV/AIDS in Young Adult Novels Project.” Our most recent (in press) publication is an annotated bibliography for Scarecrow Press.