Meet the Editors

 Co-Editors

Elizabeth Goodenough
Co-Editor

Elizabeth Goodenough has taught at Harvard, Claremont McKenna, and the University of Michigan’s Residential College, School of Education, and School of Information. Her books include Secret Spaces of Childhood (University of Michigan Press); Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War; and Infant Tongues: The Voice of the Child in Literature (Wayne State University Press). She helped produce the award-winning PBS documentary, Where Do the Children Play? and authored companion volumes A Study Guide to the Film and A Place for Play. A recent member of the Children’s Literature Association’s critical book and Phoenix Award committees, she now serves on the advisory boards of The Michigan Quarterly Review and the Max Courage Curriculum.

Marilynn Olson
Co-Editor

Marilynn S. Olson has been professor and director of Advanced Studies in English at Texas State University. She was associate editor and then editor of the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly from 1991-2000; her recent book (2012) is Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde: Painting in Paris 1890-1915. Recent chapters include “John Ruskin and the Mutual Influences of Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde” for Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer’s Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde (2015) and “Art History and the Picturebook” for the Routledge Companion to the Picturebook (2018). Olson has also co-authored a number of articles on astronomy, art, and literature with her husband, Donald Olson.

"Perhaps nothing more profoundly influences an individual than the books read in childhood. America has been blessed with readers who became our leaders. Goodenough and Olson have done a great service. Their remarkable book ambitiously sets out to prove how deeply children's literature has helped shape the minds and souls of those who have guided our nation through war and peace. And I for one am grateful for it."

Michael Patrick Hearn, author of The Annotated Wizard of Oz 

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