The Anna Freud Centre Conference: Child Study Center at Yale University

Anna Freud Centre program at the Yale Child Study Center

Participant Biographies

Authors

David Almond grew up in a large Catholic family in the North of England. He wrote short stories for adults for many years. His first novel for children, Skellig, won the Carnegie Medal, the Whitbread Award, and became an international bestseller. The novels, plays and stories that followed have brought popular success, widespread critical acclaim, and a string of major prizes, including the Michael L. Printz Award, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award and a second Whitbread. His work is translated into over twenty languages, and has been adapted for film, radio and stage. His most recent novel is Clay. Forthcoming: My Dad’s a Birdman, (illustrated novel for younger children), a stage version of The Fire-Eaters and an opera of Skellig. He has taught in primary, adult and special education, and is Visiting Professor in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University. He lives with his family in Northumberland. “David Almond’s novels are strange, unsettling wild things - unfettered by the normal constraints of children’s literature. They are, like all great literature, unclassifiable.” The Guardian.

Born on July 17, 1946 in Dayton, Ohio Chris Crutcher grew up in Cascade, Idaho (a tiny logging town north of Boise). He graduated from Eastern Washington State College (now EWU) with a BA in psychology and sociology. He later earned his teaching credentials and taught primary and secondary school in Washington State and California. Offered the chance to direct a "last chance" alternative school in Oakland, CA, he served at-risk K-12 students for almost a decade before returning to the Pacific Northwest to write. Crutcher's fast-paced fiction — heavily influenced by his work as a therapist and child protection advocate — is known for its expert balance of comedy and tragedy, as well as its unflinching honesty and authentic voice. He has been honored with dozens of awards and honors including the CLA's 2005 St. Katharine Drexel Award, Writer Magazine's 2004 Writers Who Make A Difference Award, the ALA's 2000 Margaret A. Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award, the NCTE's 1998 National Intellectual Freedom Award and the ALAN Award.

Bestselling author Neil Gaiman has long been one of the top writers in modern comics, as well as writing books for readers of all ages. Gaiman's first book for children, The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish, illustrated by Dave McKean, came out in May 1997, was listed by Newsweek as one of the best children's books of the year, and was reissued to acclaim by HarperCollins in 2003. His children's novel Coraline, published in 2002, was a New York Times and international bestseller and an enormous critical success; it won the Elizabeth Burr/ Worzalla, the BSFA, the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Bram Stoker awards. Director Henry Selick is making the film “Coraline,” with music provided by the band They Might Be Giants. In 2003 The Wolves in the Walls, illustrated by his longtime collaborator Dave McKean, was published, and it was named by the New York Times as one of the best illustrated books of the year. It is currently being made into an opera by the Scottish National Theatre. Born and raised in England, Neil Gaiman now lives near Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Robie H. Harris grew up in Buffalo, New York. Harris writes picture books and nonfiction and is known for writing about serious issues with honesty and humor. In her twenties, when she trained as a teacher at Bank Street, Harris came to understand and respect the depth and legitimacy of children’s strong feelings. At the Bank Street Writer's Laboratory, she worked with veteran children’s book authors Irma Black and Bill Hooks, sitting together with pencil, paper and a toy piano, and writing songs and the opening segments for ABC's Captain Kangaroo Show. Here Harris learned to spend the morning writing, and the afternoon rewriting, and collaboration became a habit. Her picture book Goodbye Mousie! was a Publisher's Weekly Best Children's Book of the Year, Happy Birth Day!, a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year. Her nonfiction book It’s Perfectly Normal! was a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Book, and a New York Times Best Book of the Year as was her nonfiction book It’s So Amazing! Her nonfiction book for children age four and up, It’s Not The Stork! A Book About Girls, Boys, Babies, Bodies, Families, and Friends, illustrated by Michael Emberley, has just been published.

Lois Lowry was born in Honolulu in 1937 and grew up in Pennsylvania, Tokyo, and New York before attending Brown University and later the Universoty of Southern Maine. Mother of four and grandmother of four, she now divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts and and a 1768 farmhouse in Bridgton, Maine. Her books have won countless honors, among them two Newbery Medals, and have been translated into 22 languages. Her book The Giver, currently in production as a major motion picture, has been among the most challenged books in the United States, and at the same time is used as part of the curricula of many schools and religious institutions. Her most recent book, Gossamer, is currently being adapted to the stage.

Pam Muñoz Ryan has written over thirty books for young people that include picture books for the very young, (Mud is Cake, Mice and Beans, Hello Ocean) picture books for older readers (Amelia and Eleanor Go for a Ride, When Marian Sang, Nacho and Lolita) to middle grade and young adult novels. Esperenza Rising received the Pura Belpre Medal, the Jane Addams Peace Award, an ALA Top Ten Best Book for Young Adults, the Americas Award Honor and other accolades. Most recently, Becoming Naomi León received the ALA Schneider Family Award, the Tomás Rivera Award, an ALA Notable book and the Pura Belpre Honor. She is twice the recipient of the Willa Cather Literary Award for Writing (The Willa). Born and raised in the San Joaquin Valley of California, she received her bachelor's and master's degrees at San Diego State University in Child Development and Post-Secondary Education and now lives in north San Diego County with her family.

Martin Waddell was brought up in Newcastle, Co.Down, in Northern Ireland, where he now lives, but spent about ten years in London. He is one of the most prolific and successful of children’s writers with over two hundred books to his name, for readers from very small children to young adults. He firmly believes that books are for enjoyment, and that they open a window on the world for young readers. Many of his books are simply good fun, but they all say something about life. He has written award winning picture books, including the Little Bear books, and novels which look at the impact of the Northern Ireland situation on the lives of young people. In 2004 he was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal for his important and lasting contribution to children's literature.

New York Times bestselling author and illustrator Mo Willems began his career as an animator and writer for Television, garnering six Emmy Awards during his tenure as a scriptwriter and filmmaker at PBS’ Sesame Street. Mo went on to create short subjects for Nickelodeon, MTV, HBO, and festivals before ending up at Cartoon Network, where he created the animated series Sheep in the Big City and head-wrote the first four seasons of Codename: Kids Next Door. Commenting on his picture book work, The New York Times Book Review called Mo “the biggest new talent to emerge thus far in the 00's". In addition to creating Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! and Knuffle Bunny: a Cautionary Tale, both of which were awarded Caldecott Honors, Mo has recently published You Can Never Find a Rickshaw When it Monsoons, a cartoon memoir documenting the year he spent backpacking around the world in 1990.

Born on February 12, 1963, in Columbus, Ohio, Jacqueline Woodson grew up in Greenville, South Carolina and Brooklyn, New York and graduated from college with a B.A. in English. A former drama therapist for runaways and homeless children in New York City, she now writes full-time and is the author of many of books for children and young adults. She has received numerous awards for her writing, including the Coretta Scott King Award and an LA Times Book Prize for Miracle's Boys, two Coretta Scott King honors, The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Excellence in Fiction and ALA Best Book for Young Adults for If You Come Softly. Her picture book Coming On Home Soon, illustrated by E.B. Lewis, was a 2005 Caldecott Honor Book. Though she spends most of her time writing, Woodson also enjoys reading the works of emerging writers and encouraging young people to write, heated political conversations with her friends, and time with her young daughter. Jacqueline Woodson currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.

Analysts

Dr. Karen Gilmore is currently an Associate Director of the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and Head of the Child Division. She came to Columbia in 1997 to develop the Child Division; at that time, she founded the Parent-Infant Program with Susan Coates, and launched the Child Analysis Program. She is a Training and Supervising Analyst at Columbia and also at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute where she was trained. She is also Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia. Dr. Gilmore is a graduate summa cum laude of Radcliffe College and received a MA in Clinical Psychology from NYU before switching to medical school. She received her degree in medicine from NYU and served as resident and child resident at Payne Whitney Clinic, where she received the award for Clinical Excellence. She has been supervising residents at Payne Whitney for over twenty years. Dr. Gilmore has published a number of papers on a range of clinical topics, such as adoption, sexual development and gender identity disorder, and attention deficit disorder.

Alicia F. Lieberman works with and teaches about the inner life and intimate relationships of babies, toddlers and preschoolers. She authored The Emotional Life of the Toddler (1993/5), and is senior author of Losing a Parent in the Early Years: Guidelines for the Treatment of Traumatic Grief in Infancy and Early Childhood (2004) and Don't Hit my Mommy: A Manual for Child-Parent Psychotherapy for Young Witnesses of Family Violence (2005). As the director of the UCSF Child Trauma Research Project at San Francisco General Hospital, she leads the development and implementation of Child-Parent Psychotherapy, a relationship-based treatment approach with empirical evidence of efficacy with traumatized young children and their mothers. Born and raised in Paraguay, she received her B. A. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her Ph. D. from The Johns Hopkins University. Her Jewish, Latino, and immigrant experiences make her keenly aware of the impact of reality and culture on children's personality and imagination.

Nicholas Midgley studied English Literature at Oxford University and published papers on the work of W.B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf and other modernist writers before deciding to train as a child and adolescent psychotherapist at the Anna Freud Centre, London. He now works clinically in the National Health Service and is on the teaching staff of the Anna Freud Centre, London and the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex.

Arietta Slade, Ph.D. is Professor of Clinical and Developmental Psychology at the City University of New York, and Associate Research Scientist at the Yale Child Study Center. A clinician, teacher, and researcher, she has published widely in a number of areas, including the clinical implications of attachment theory and research, the interface between psychoanalysis and attachment theory, the development of the parent-child relationship and parental representations of the child, the relational contexts of play and early symbolization, and — most recently — the development of parental reflective functioning. She is editor, with Dennie Wolf, of Children at Play: Developmental and Clinical Approaches to Meaning and Representation. She has also been in private practice for twenty-five years, working with children and adults, and has for the past five years been involved in developing early intervention programs for high-risk families and their children at the Yale Child Study Center.

Jenny Stoker is a child and adult psychoanalyst who has worked for many years with toddlers and their parents at the Anna Freud Centre as well as having a private practice. Author of You and Your Toddler, a book aimed at helping parents understand their young children better she has also contributed to academic journals and to magazines for parents and allied professionals.

Judith A. Yanof, M.D. is a Training and Supervising Analyst and a Child Supervisor at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She is also an Instructor at the Harvard Medical School. She has written articles on several different aspects of child analysis, including gender, development, transference, and termination. Her article, “Language, Communication, and Transference in Child Analysis: Is Child Analysis Really Analysis?” received the 1996 Journal Essay Award of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She has served on the Editorial Board of JAPA, and currently serves on the Editorial Board of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child and is a Reader for The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. She is a consultant to Boston University’s Child Witness to Violence Program and to the Horizons Initiative Child Care Center, an inner city daycare center for the homeless. She chairs many outreach programs at BPSI including the community film program, Off the Couch.

Keynote Speakers

Gregory Maguire is the New York Times bestselling author of twenty books for children and five novels for adults, including Wicked, the inspiration for the Broadway and West End musical of the same name. His novel, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, aired on ABC as a film starring Stockard Channing and Jonathan Pryce. Among his children's books, the forthcoming novel The Tooth Trade most directly concerns the themes of this conference. He has reviewed occasionally for the Sunday New York Times Book Review, the Christian Science Monitor, and has published in Plougshares. He is a founder and, for twenty years, co-director of a children's literature advocacy charity called Children's Literature New England, Inc. A lecturer about literature and culture at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the De Cordova Museum in Lincoln, Mass., he has been a recipient of numerous fellowships at arts colonies in the United States. Mr. Maguire is married to the painter Andy Newman, and with their three children they spend their year on the East Coast of the United States and in France.

Dr. Stephen Marans is Professor of Child Psychiatry and Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine where he is also the Director of the National Center for Children Exposed to Violence (NCCEV) and the Childhood Violent Trauma Center (CVTC) at the Child Study Center. Dr. Marans is the founder of the Child Development-Community Policing Program, a partnership between police, mental health and other service providers that responds to the needs of children and families involved in violent events. The NCCEV was established by the U.S. Department of Justice, and the White House to raise public awareness about the effects of violence and to provide training and technical assistance to communities throughout the country in their efforts to respond to children and families exposed to violence. Dr. Marans has led the NCCEV in responding to September 11th, and in the development of preparedness and response to terrorism plans at the state and federal level. He has also served on the National Commission on Children and Terrorism and has written extensively on child development, psychotherapeutic intervention, violent trauma and mental health-law enforcement collaboration. Dr. Marans is the author of Listening to Fear; Helping Kids Cope from Nightmares to the Nightly News.