Kwame Alexander has been named the Dorothy Carter Writer-in-Residence by the Bank Street Center for Children’s Literature.
From early April through mid-May, the recently crowned Newbery Medal winner will work with kids (ages 9 to 10) on their poetry curriculum. Alexander (pictured, via) will be the first writer to inaugurate this program. Bank Street will host a conversation event between Alexander and his father, Dr. E. Curtis Alexander, on April 6th. Leonard S. Marcus, a famed historian, has been brought on to serve as the moderator.
Here’s more from the press release: “Bank Street College is establishing an endowment to continue this residency in the name of Dorothy Carter, a children’s book author, a Broadway actress, the first African-American member of the Bank Street College graduate faculty, and a leader of the Bank Street Writers Lab. We lost Dr. Carter in 2012, but her legacy will live on through the Dorothy Carter Writer-in-Residence program. It is fortuitous that Kwame Alexander will inaugurate this program–not only because he is the winner of the 2015 Newbery Medal, but also because his father, Dr. E. Curtis Alexander, who graduated from Bank Street College Graduate School of Education in 1970, worked directly with Dorothy Carter in the Harlem Institute for Teachers.”