Teacher Fun Day

Perfect Your Craft and Inspire Creativity

Thursday, Nov. 15, 10:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m., Room 7128 (Building 7, 1st Floor)

Teacher Fun Day: Perfect Your Craft and Inspire Creativity is designed to share tips, lesson plans and ideas on inspiring students to write, draw and look inside themselves to channel their inner creativity. This special event at Miami Book Fair International brings together teachers, librarians and educators, including homeschooling parents, for an informative and inspirational day of workshops and special presentations with well-known authors.

10 a.m. Intro and Welcome:
Carol Fitzgerald, founder of Kidsreads.com, Teenreads.com and GraphicNovelReporter.com

10:05 -10:55 a.m.
Session 1: "YES...AND!  Using The Rules of Improv Comedy in Writing and The Classroom" with Chris Grabenstein

Before Chris Grabenstein became a multiple award-winning author of middle grades books, he spent five years doing improvisational comedy in New York City and on the college tour circuit with performers such as Bruce Willis and Robin Williams.   Today, Chris still uses the basic rules of improv every day when he sits down to write.  In this fun and funny presentation, he'll show you how to use improvisation as a classroom tool for kick-starting creativity and, maybe, a philosophy for life!

The books in Chris Grabenstein's Haunted Mystery series for middle grades readers (THE CROSSROADS, THE HANGING HILL, THE SMOKY CORRIDOR, and THE BLACK HEART CRYPT) have won an Anthony and three Agatha awards. His RILEY MACK AND THE OTHER KNOWN TROUBLEMAKERS is a comic crime caper for kids. Recently, Chris co-authored two books with James Patterson:  DANIEL X: ARMAGGEDON and I FUNNY. http://www.chrisgrabenstein.com/kids/

 

11:00 -11:50 a.m.
Session 2: Pop-up books and Paper Engineering with Matthew Reinhart

Matthew Reinhart is a renowned paper engineer and bona fide STARS WARS aficionado. He created the NEW YORK TIMES bestselling STAR WARS: A POP-UP GUIDE TO THE GALAXY with Lucasfilm, published by Orchard Books. He also created DC SUPER HEROES: THE ULTIMATE POP-UP BOOK and MOMMY? by Maurice Sendak. He has worked with Robert Sabuda on many fantastic pop-up titles such as THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ; ABC DISNEY; the Encyclopedia Mythologica trilogy; and the Encyclopedia Prehistorica trilogy. He lives in New York City.

 

Lunch 11:50-12:50 p.m.

 

1 -1:50 p.m.
Session 3: Teaching Creativity with Scott Hutchins:
There’s no better way to crack open your favorite prose than by imitating it. In this workshop, we’ll admire three singular stylists (and great story-tellers) and then set about butchering their work, having them write each other’s stories, or your stories, or even letters to your parents. You’ll leave the workshop with several new voices in your toolbox, as well as new skills for illuminating the books of your reading future!

Scott Hutchins is a former Truman Capote fellow in the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University. His work has appeared inStoryQuarterly, Five Chapters, The Owls, The Rumpus, The New York Times, San Francisco Magazine and Esquire, and was recently set to music. He is the recipient of two major Hopwood awards and the Andrea Beauchamp prize in short fiction.  In 2006 and 2010, he was an artist-in-residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. His novel A Working Theory of Love was released October 2nd.

 

2 - 2:50 p.m.
Session 4: Keynote Presentation by Raina Telgemeier

Raina Telgemeier will introduce the early influences on her work as a comic artist, from Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh to Calvin & Hobbs, and describe her path to becoming a comic artist along with her process for creating graphic novels. Raina will also discuss her inspirations including how her own life experiences contribute to her work—both in SMILE, a memoir of her middle-school years, as well as in DRAMA, her new fictional graphic novel.

Raina Telgemeier grew up in San Francisco and moved to New York City, where she earned an illustration degree at the School of Visual Arts. SMILE, her critically acclaimed graphic memoir based on her childhood, was a #1 New York Times bestseller, winner of the Eisner Award for Best Publication for Teens, and a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor recipient. Raina also adapted and illustrated The Baby-sitters Club graphic novels, which were selected for YALSA’s Great Graphic Novels for Teens list in 2007 and Booklist’s Top 10 Graphic Novels for Youth list.

DRAMA, her most recent graphic novel was released in September 2012 and is already a New York Times bestseller. In a starred review Publishers Weekly raved, “another dead-on look at the confusing world of middle school, sweetly capturing all the drama swirling around the school production…Telgemeier’s manga-infused art has some moments of heartache, but the generally cheerful and affirming story should be eagerly devoured by her many fans.”

Raina lives in Astoria, New York, with her husband and fellow comics artist, Dave Roman. To learn more, visit her online at www.goRaina.com and on Twitter at @GoRaina.

 

Teacher Fun Day is made possible in part with the support of GraphicNovelReporter.com

Author(s) and Guest(s)

Chris Grabenstein

In the fourth volume of Chris Grabenstein's popular Haunted Mysteries series, The Black Heart Crypt (Yearling, $6.99), Zack must yet again do battle with malevolent spirits. And with perseverance and pluck, and the assistance of three dotty aunts, he must save his town from a 200-year-old threat. Grabenstein is the Agatha and Anthony award-winning author of The Crossroads and The Hanging Hill as well as several adult thrillers. 

Matthew Reinhart

Matthew Reinhart delivers another remarkable pop-up book based on George Lucas’s epic Star Wars movies in Star Wars: A Galactic Pop-up Adventure (Orchard Books/Scholastic, $36.99).   Star War flies off the page, complete with working light sabers, pull tabs, and other interactive features.  “[C]alling this sophisticated piece of engineering a ‘pop-up book’ is like calling the Great Wall of China a partition. . .”—New York Times Book Review.  Reinhart has created other highly-praised pop-up books, including Star Wars:  A Pop-Up Guide to the Galaxy, and DC Super Heroes:  The Ultimate Pop-Up Book. 

Scott Hutchins

In his debut novel, A Working Theory of Love (Penguin, $25.95), Scott Hutchins takes readers on an odyssey of love, grief, and reconciliation.  Set in San Francisco following the implosion of his marriage, a young man works on creating the first sentient computer by feeding it his father’s diary entries.  When he discovers a missing year in the diaries—a year that must hold some secret to his parents’ marriage and perhaps even his father’s suicide—everything Neill thought he knew about his past comes into question. Hutchins is a former Truman Capote fellow in the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University.

Raina Telgemeier

Agnes Quill: An Anthology of Mystery (SLG Publishing, $10.95) is the first anthology of the teenage detective series, written by Dave Roman and illustrated by Raina Telgemeier, Jaeff Zornow, and Jason Ho.  Set in Legerdemain—a congested, fog-filled, cobblestone-paved Victorian city built around a cemetery the size of Central Park—Agnes’ adventures include confrontations with trapped spirits, cursed souls, possessed relatives, disappearing pets, decapitated scientists, ambitious zombies, and a mess of other supernatural oddities.  Telgemeier is the author and illustrator of the critically acclaimed graphic novel memoir, Smile.  Her comics have been nominated for the Ignatz, Cybil, and Eisner Awards.

Schedule

Thursday, Nov. 15, 10:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m.

$30

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Location

Miami Book Fair International * Miami Dade College
300 NE Second Ave., Miami, FL 33132
Room 7128 (Building 7, 1st Floor)