Meet Our Faculty
Patricia Lee Gauch
Founding faculty member
A longtime Editorial Director at Philomel Books, Patti Gauch edited three Caldecott award-winning books and a National Book Award-winning author over her career. She has taught at Manhattanville College, Drew and Rutgers University.
Gary D. Schmidt
Founding faculty member
Author of more than a dozen books for children and young adults, Gary Schmidt is a two-time Newbery Honor and Children’s Choice award winner, and a National Book Award finalist. He teaches writing, children’s literature at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI.
2024 Faculty
Liz Bicknell
Liz Bicknell has worked as a children's book editor for more than 25 years. Most recently, she was Executive Editorial Director at Candlewick Press, working with such luminaries as M.T. Anderson, Ekua Holmes, Gregory Maguire, Jon Klassen, Laura Amy Schlitz, and Carole Boston Weatherford. Books she has edited have won the National Book Award, the Caldecott Medal, the Coretta Scott King Medal, and many other awards.
Heather Camlot
Heather is an award-winning children’s author, journalist, editor and translator. She has written five nonfiction books and two novels for middle-grade readers, including Clutch and The Prisoner and the Writer. Her books have garnered awards including, Her books have garnered several awards, including a Kirkus Reviews Best Book, the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for children and youth and two Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selections.
Kathryn Erskine
Kathryn Erskine is the author of seven novels for young people, including National Book Award winner, Mockingbird, and Jane Addams Peace Award honor book Seeing Red. She has also authored several picture books, her latest with artist Keith Henry Brown, My Dad is a DJ, as well as a middle-grade biography of Abraham Lincoln.
Leah Henderson
Leah Henderson is the author of many critically-acclaimed books for young readers including The Courage of the Little Hummingbird, Your Voice, Your Vote, The Magic in Changing Your Stars, A Day for Rememberin’, and Together We March. She holds an MFA in Writing and is on faculty in Spalding University’s graduate writing program. Because she has serious wanderlust, when she isn’t creating stories, she’s off someplace in the world getting lost, then found, discovering new ones.
Karen Krossing
Karen Krossing is the critically acclaimed author of twelve books for kids and teens, including picture books One Tiny Bubble and Sour Cakes, and novels Monster vs. Boy, Punch Like a Girl, Bog, and Cut the Lights. She is also an editor and mentor of new and emerging voices. She won the SCBWI Crystal Kite Award for Canada in 2015 and 2023 and has been a finalist for the Ontario Library Association White Pine Award and the Joan F. Kaywell Books Save Lives Award, among other honors. She holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Lisa Papademetriou
Lisa Papademetriou is a former editor with Scholastic, HarperCollins, and Disney Press, and has taught at Sierra Nevada College’s MFA program in Writing. Her critically acclaimed novels include of A Tale of Highly Unusual Magic, Middle School: My Brother is a Big, Fat Liar and Homeroom Diaries (both with James Patterson). She is also the founder of Bookflow.pub.
Phyllis Root
Phyllis Root is the award-winning author of over fifty fiction and non-fiction picture books, including Big Momma Makes the World and One Duck Stuck. She taught at the Vermont College MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults program for ten years and has been teaching at Hamline University’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young Adults program for the past thirteen years.
Liz Garton Scanlon
Liz Garton Scanlon is the author of numerous beloved books for young people, including the highly-acclaimed, Caldecott-honored picture book, All the World, two middle-grade novels, and an upcoming chapter book series. Liz serves on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in Austin, Texas.
Laura Shovan
Laura Shovan is a novelist, educator, and Pushcart Prize-nominated poet. Her work appears in journals and anthologies for children and adults. Laura’s award-winning middle-grade novels include The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary, Takedown, and the Sydney Taylor Notable A Place at the Table, written with Saadia Faruqi. Laura is a longtime poet-in-the-schools for the Maryland State Arts Council. She also teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Mitali Perkins
Shelley Tanaka
Author of more than twenty books for children and young adults, Mitali is a National Book Award nominee and has served as a judge for the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Award. She recently was selected as the inaugural Distinguished Writer in Residence at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI, and is a former instructor at Saint Mary's College of California and Antioch University's Master of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young Adults.
Shelley Tanaka is an editor, writer, and teacher. She is the longtime fiction editor at Groundwood Books, where she has edited more than a dozen Governor General’s Award-winning titles. She is the author of thirty books for young readers and is faculty emerita of Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults.
Nick Thomas
Nick Thomas is Executive Editor at Levine Querido. He has previously held roles at Bloomsbury, Chicken House, David Fickling Books, and Arthur A. Levine Books. Among the books he has edited are Newbery and Pura Belpré-winning The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera; Newbery Honor-winning A Snake Falls to Earth and Locus Award Winner Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger; Printz Honor-winning Apple (Skin to the Core) by Eric Gansworth; and Walter Award-winning Man Made Monsters by Andrea L. Rogers.
