The 38 cassette tapes in this collection hold keynote addresses of authors and illustrators who spoke at the University of Georgia’s Children’s Literature Conference/Georgia Conference on Children’s Literature between 1974-1993. These addresses include speeches from well known award winning authors and illustrators including but not limited to Robert Burch, Doris B. Smith, Tomie dePaola, Jane Yolen, Stephen Kellog, and Lois Lowry.
The Georgia Conference on Children’s Literature, originally named The Children’s Literature Conference, is an annual University of Georgia sponsored event hosted by the Mary Frances Early College of Education. The conference itself, in conjunction with the Georgia Children’s Book Award, was established in 1968 by Shelton Root, then professor in the Department of Language Education at the University of Georgia. The purpose of the conference and the corresponding award is to foster a love of reading in the children of Georgia and to introduce the children of Georgia to books of literary excellence.
The cassette tapes in this collection were originally a part of Dr. Carolyn Gabb’s personal library of audio recordings that she used with students at both the University of Georgia and Penn State University. Dr. Gabb sent the tapes to Dr. Mary Napoli, also of Penn State University, who then forwarded them to Dr. Jennifer Graff, professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education in the Mary Frances Early College of Education at the University of Georgia. Amy Pulliam, a doctoral student serving as Dr. Graff’s research assistant Spring 2022, with the help of Dr. Kathleen deMarrais and Mary Miller, was afforded the opportunity to donate the cassette tapes to the University of Georgia Special Collections Libraries on behalf of Dr. Jennifer Graff and Dr. Carolyn Gabb in the Spring of 2022 so that the speeches could be preserved and made accessible.
