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Kerry Madden, author of Harper Lee: Up Close, our guest blogger for the week of 3/23

Fri, 03/20/2009

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Kerry Madden is our guest blogger during the week of March 23rd. If you have any questions for Kerry Madden, add a comment to any of her posts.

Here is more information about Harper Lee: Up Close:

Nelle Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960 and became an instant bestseller. Two years later it was an Academy Award– winning film. Today, it remains standard—and beloved—reading in English classes. But Lee never wanted “the book” to define who she was, which explains her aversion to any kind of publicity. Kerry Madden conducted extensive research for this Up Close biography, which reveals Lee to be a down-to-earth Southern woman who enjoys baseball games and playing golf—and whose one and only published book happened to win the Pulitzer Prize.

About Kerry Madden:

Kerry Madden has written plays, journalism (Los Angeles Times, Salon, Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art, and Sierra Club Magazine), and six books including Offsides, a New York Library Pick for 1997, and Writing Smarts, a guide to creative writing published by American Girl. In 2005 she turned her hand to children’s literature with Gentle's Holler, the first installment in what became the award-winning Maggie Valley Trilogy, Viking Children's Books. It earned starred reviews in both Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly, was named a “Pick” by both the New York and the Chicago Public Libraries, and was the featured children’s book of North Carolina at the National Book Festival. The next book in the trilogy, Louisiana’s Song (2007) was equally well received, being named a Bank Street College Book of the Year and a finalist for several other awards. The third installment, Jessie’s Mountain, was published in 2008 to strong reviews. Most recently Madden published UpClose Harper Lee as part of Viking's UpClose Series and received a starred Kirkus for this biography. She has taught at the University of Tennessee, Ningbo University in China, UCLA, and elsewhere, and has visited schools across the country as a guest author. She has just accepted a new job at the University of Alabama in Birmingham as a professor of Creative Writing beginning the fall of 2009.

Harper Lee: Up Close
Kerry Madden - author