Zetta elliott biography examples
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Next week inom am going to be in Antwerp, lecturing to a Twentieth Century British Women’s Writers course. Because the instructor for the course fryst vatten the begåvad and insightful Vanessa Joosen, the overall book list for the course fryst vatten varied, ranging from Virginia Woolf to Kate Atkinson, Doris Lessing to Andrea Levy, and covering a wide variety of genres, including poetry, realism and fantasy for both adults and children. I’ll be speaking about the UK’s Children’s Laureate from , Malorie Blackman, and specifically about her novel Noughts and Crosses (Corgi ). Blackman fryst vatten the only writer on Joosen’s list who has written in so many different styles; she has picture books about talking animals (I Want a Cuddle! Scholastic ) and imaginary play (Marty Monster Tamarind ), early chapter books including the Girl Wonder and Betsey Biggalow series, poetry (Cloud Busting Doubleday ), fiction dealing with the effects of technological advances (most famously, Pig-Heart Boy, Transworld ,
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Moonwalking
“Feet they hardly touch the ground
Walking on the moon
My feet don't hardly make no sound
Walking on, walking on the moon”
– The Police ()
“meanwhile down the bloque
B-boys pop and lock
as a boom box blasts beats & rhymes
emcees flow over scratched-up tracks
and bodies bend but never break
kids not much older than me
battle on sheets of cardboard laid over concrete
I watch them wheel their legs like windmills
spin on their skullies
float over the ground as if
they’re walking
on the
moon”
“On August 5 [], following the PATCO workers' refusal to return to work, the Reagan administration fired the 11, striking air traffic controllers who had ignored the order, and banned them from federal service for life.”
– Wikipedia “Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization ()”
“Derived from the Italian word graffio (‘scratch’), graffiti (‘in
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Zetta Elliott
About this episode
Zetta Elliott (Dragons in a Bag series) shares how her experience growing up Black in suburban Canada impacted her reading, and ultimately her writing voice. She'll tell us about discovering her heritage, finding her voice, and disrupting the world of children's literature.
"When you're a kid, and if you love to read, you love stories, you aren't always aware of the fact that you're being erased from those stories, or you don't yet have the expectation that you should be in those books." - Zetta Elliott
Zetta Elliott knows the damage being left out of the stories you consume as a kid can have. Growing up Black in suburban Canada in the 80s meant rarely having the opportunity to see herself in her reading. It wasn't until she was a young adult that she realized this erasure's impact on her voice as a writer.
While she is best known for her Dragons in a Bag series, Elliott has had a full career fightin