Eliot Schrefer is the featured speaker of the Marilyn Cory Speaker Series for Spring 2015. He will speak on Tuesday, March 10 from 7-8 PM in Art and Journalism 175.

He is the author of Threatened and Endangered, which was a National Book Finalist (2012), one of NPR’s “Best of 2012” and an editor’s choice in the New York Times. He has also written other young adult novels, such as Glamorous Disasters, The School for Dangerous Girls (selected as “Best of the Teen Age” by New York Public Library), and The Deadly Sister (earning a starred review from Library Journal).

The title of his talk is “Getting Others Into View: Crossing the Lines Between Teen and Adult, and Human and Animal, in Young Adult Literature.” Eliot’s talk will center on boundary crossings and navigating borderlines, especially in the realm of young adult literature.  He will focus on discourse by and about adult and teen readers and writers, and how such discourse parallels the ways we discuss Africa and animal conservation.

Dr. Susanna Benko has been teaching Schrefer’s work in her ENG 414 Young Adult Literature course for a number of years, and the author has been visiting Ball State via Skype. Here’s a blog post by Blake Mellencamp about one of those virtual visits.