The Wake Forest Center for Literacy Education, Department of Education, and Skip Prosser Literacy Program will host authors, A.S. King and Chris Crutcher on campus Tuesday, April 14.
For anyone interested in young adult literature and/or creative writing, two award-winning authors, A.S. King and Chris Crutcher, will be on campus on Tuesday, April 14.
There are two opportunities for Wake Forest students to engage with them.
The first is an informal gathering on campus from 3:30 to 4:15 on Tuesday, April 14, in DeTamble Auditorium, Tribble Hall. The title of the event is “Swapping Stories: An Intimate Conversation with A.S. King and Chris Crutcher.” If you would like to join, please REGISTER HERE by Monday, April 13.
If you cannot make the on-campus panel, feel free to join us at Bookmarks on Tuesday, April 15, 5:30-6:30 pm for “Writing Young Adult Literature with A.S. King and Chris Crutcher.” You can learn more and register here. Bookmarks is located in downtown Winston-Salem at 634 W. 4th Street #110.
A.S. King is the only author ever to win the Michael L. Printz Medal twice, having won it again in 2024 for The Collectors, a story anthology, making it the only anthology that has ever won the Printz. She has published many other highly-acclaimed novels including 2021’s SW/TCH, 2020 Michael L. Printz Award winner and LA Times Book Prize finalist DIG, 2016’s Still Life with Tornado, 2015’s surrealist I Crawl Through It, Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future, Reality Boy, the 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner Ask the Passengers, Everybody Sees the Ants, 2011 Michael L. Printz Honor Book Please Ignore Vera Dietz among others. She also writes acclaimed and bestselling Middle Grade Fiction as Amy Sarig King.
She is a former faculty member of several MFA writing programs and spends many months of the year traveling the country speaking to high school and university students, educators, and humans who care about the mental health of young people. She has recently launched a non-profit, Gracie’s House, which provides and maintains safe spaces for LGBTQ+ youth in rural areas.
Chris Crutcher was raised in Cascade, Idaho, a lumber and cattle ranch town located in the central Idaho Rockies, a two hour drive over treacherous two-lane from the nearest movie theater and a good forty minutes from the nearest bowling alley. Crutcher’s years as teacher, then director, of a K-12 alternative school in Oakland, California through the nineteen-seventies, and his subsequent twenty-odd years as a therapist specializing in child abuse and neglect, inform his thirteen novels and two collections of short stories.
Chris has received a number of coveted awards, from his high school designation as “Most Likely to Plagiarize” to the American Library Association’s Margaret A. Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award. His favorites are his two Intellectual Freedom awards, one from the National Council for Teachers of English and the other from the National Coalition Against Censorship.