2007 ALSC Bechtel Fellowship Winner named

Contact: Laura Schulte-Cooper

ALSC Program Officer

312-280-2165

lschulte@ala.org

For Immediate Release

February 13, 2007

2007 ALSC Bechtel Fellowship winner named

CHICAGO - The Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), is pleased to announce that children’s librarian Charmette Kuhn-Kendrick has been selected as the 2007 recipient of the Louise Seaman Bechtel Fellowship.

The Bechtel Fellowship is designed to allow a qualified children’s librarian to spend a month or more reading and studying at the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature, part of the George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida, Gainesville, which contains a special collection of 85,000 volumes of children’s literature published mostly before 1950.

The fellowship is endowed in memory of Louise Seaman Bechtel and Ruth M. Baldwin and provides a stipend of $4,000, which must be used between January and September 2008.

Kuhn-Kendrick will study “The Goblins Will Get Ya: A Survey of Horror in Children’s Literature from the 19th and Early 20th Centuries.” She will read and study scary stories in juvenile fiction, non-fiction and folk tales to evaluate the lessons being taught to young readers through horror and to illuminate how horror has evolved in children’s literature.

Members of the 2007 Louise Seaman Bechtel Fellowship Committee were: Denise Agosto, chair, Drexel University, Philadelphia; Ernie J. Cox, St. Timothy’s School, Raleigh, N.C.; Floyd C. Dickman, Columbus, Ohio; Sandra Lane Fouts, Hayward (Calif.) Public Library; Nancy Gifford, Schenectady County (N.Y.) Public Library; and Cecily Pilzer, Georgetown Day School, Washington, D.C.