YA

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EP06-An Analysis of the Athletic Protagonist with Shannon Gibney

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EP06-ShannonGibney.jpg

In this episode:

Deb deep dives into literary analysis in both of Shannon Gibney’s incredible YA novels. Using Deb’s MFA thesis as a guide, the two explore the sports novel as a medium granting athletic protagonists a feeling of authenticity, emotional resonance, and genuine challenges - both on and off of the field.

About Shannon Gibney:

Shannon Gibney is a writer, educator, activist, and the author of See No Color (Carolrhoda Lab, 2015), a young adult novel that won the 2016 Minnesota Book Award in Young Peoples' Literature. Gibney is faculty in English at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, where she teaches critical and creative writing, journalism, and African Diasporic topics. A Bush Artist and McKnight Writing Fellow, her new novel, Dream Country, is about more than five generations of an African descended family, crisscrossing the Atlantic both voluntarily and involuntarily (Dutton, 2018).

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EP04: The DNA of Rock Climbing with Kristin Lenz

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In this episode:

Deb explores Kristin’s love of nature, mountains, and the treacherous sport of rock climbing. It’s astounding to know that Kristin’s life-long passion for scaling the dangerously sheer edges of a mountainside inspired her award-winning novel The Art of Holding On and Letting Go. In this episode, Deb and Kristin engage in a deep-dive literary analysis of the novel and the inspiration that lies behind it.

About Kristin Lenz:

Kristin Bartley Lenz is a writer and social worker from metro-Detroit who fell in love with the mountains when she moved to Georgia and California. Now she’s back in Detroit where she plots wilderness escapes and manages the Michigan Chapter blog for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). Her debut young adult novel, The Art of Holding On and Letting Go, was the 2016 Helen Sheehan YA Book Prize winner, a 2016 Junior Library Guild Selection, and chosen for the 2017-2018 Great Lakes Great Books state-wide literature program. 

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Your new audience awaits.