Ashley Bryan

Wow ... you come to work every day hoping to be inspired by the words or art of an author or illustrator, and then, POW! a genius like Ashley Bryan shows up and completely blows you out of the water!

Mr. Bryan was the keynote speaker at our annual Anne Carroll Moore Lecture here at the Donnell Central Children's Room. His latest work, Let It Shine: Three Favorite Spirituals, is included as one of the NYPL's "100 Titles for Reading and Sharing" for 2007, a list that is celebrated by having one of the honorees speak to librarians, publishers, authors, illustrators, and fans.

Now, you can't even call his presentation a "speech", it was poetry as performance art, man. He brought to life and gave voices to poems that he had illustrated in the past, poems by Nikki Giovanni, Eloise Greenfield, Langston Hughes, and himself. He made the characters jump off the page, be it a landlord demanding money from a tenant, or a very, very slow snail.

A beautiful dude, and amazingly spry for a man in his mid-80s! If you ever have a chance to hear him speak, stop at nothing! Otherwise, check out any of his webcasts on the Library of Congress website. The Ella Jenkins of poetry, no?