Keywords

YA literature history, academic mentorship, graduate education

Abstract

This is another of those Year 2000 articles, but instead of gazing into my crystal ball to predict what the future of YA literature will be, I'm looking backward, tracing the genealogy of the people who established, refined, defended, and maintained the study of literature for adolescents.

When I was a graduate student at Arizona State University in 1982, I enrolled in Ken Donelson's adolescent literature course. I had met Donelson a few times before, and, frankly, he intimidated me. I was a lowly high school English teacher, and he was coeditor of English Joumal and one of the Big Names in English education and adolescent literature. Before I got to know him in class, he was not unkind, but he seemed incredibly busy, brisque, and cynical. The grad student grapevine let me know that he expected megatons of work from his students and that he had little tolerance for shoddy work and lazy students. As a lazy student with a history of shoddy work, I wondered exactly what he did to students like me. My imagination conjured up all kinds of horrible, humiliating, and maybe even painful agonies a powerful professor could inflict on a puny grad student.

Original Publication Citation

“Starting with Dora V: A Genealogy of YA Literature Specialists,” English Journal 89.3 (January 2000): 129-133.