The Praise Continues for Thomas and Poetry's Playground

Joseph T. Thomas, Jr., Assistant Professor of English and Composition, was notified this week that his book, Poetry's Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children's Poetry (Wayne State UP), has been selected as the Children's Literature Association's 2009 honor book, for outstanding book-length scholarly work.

This is a real honor in the field of children's literature studies. The honor is given annually, the committee choosing the honor book from all scholarly books published in the area of children's literature internationally.

In her review Susan Kreller describes Thomas's "great merit [in Poetry's Playground] is his canny defence of children’s poetry as an important part of poetry and his insistence that there is no such thing as real poetry,only poetry."

Thomas is quite pleased, and elated to share this honor with the department of English & Comparative Literature, SDSU's National Center for the Study of Children's Literature, the College of Arts & Letters, and, of course, the university itself.

You can also read more of Thomas's insights in his review of The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense. This text, Thomas explains, "crystallises our understanding of nonsense, even as it surveys the diverse landscape of Indian nonsense, providing insight into Indian culture,
folk-traditions, and literary history."

At SDSU's Literature.sdsu.edu, We take Children's Literature Seriously

literature.sdsu.edu student Lance de la Llana, a student of one of our noted faculty, Dr. Mary Galbraith, shows that when it comes to Children's Literature, in this instance, Maurice Sendak, he's as serious as you can get!

Children's Lit MA Students Broaden Their Literary Horizons

Children's Lit. MA students, Emily Thomas and Vanessa Chalmers recently visited the book fair in Madrid, Spain to browse Children's Literature section. The intrepid travelers wrote "We're both, representing our trade half way around the world!"

Also photographed is their favorite book, The Little Prince, translated into Hebrew as well as many other major languages.

Joseph Thomas' Review: Adventures Into Otherness

Professor Joseph Thomas reviews Maria Lassen-Seger's book, Adventures into Otherness: Child Metamorphs in Late Twentieth-Century Chidren's Literature for the International Research Society for Children's Literature. Thomas examines Lassen-Seger's exploration of child metamorphs as reactions/repressions against/by the colonizer (adults). Thomas appreciates Lassen-Seger's wide utilization of children's texts not commonly talked about while he also recognizes her ability to enlighten some of the more canonical texts. He criticizes both Lassen-Seger's neglect of the text's social and historical context as well as her dissertation -like structure and "dissertationese" prose style. A full text version of the review is available here.