As Simmons University celebrates its quasquicentennial, the Horn Book its first hundred years, and the Simmons graduate program in children’s literature its golden fiftieth birthday, I welcome this moment to thank all the Horn Book editors who have been teachers, mentors, and friends. The Horn Book has had only eight ­editors, and I’ve worked directly with five of them. They are exemplars of how to unite “passion with purpose,” our ­Simmons mission, and I am grateful for my relationships with each and all.

Simmons has three illustrious century-old neighbors: Fenway Park and the Red Sox, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The Gardner opened its doors at 280 The Fenway in 1903, and the Horn Book’s founder, Bertha Mahony [Miller], graduated from next-door Simmons in 1906. I picture Bertha as a student much like mine: immersed in a book in the sun-infused Gardner Courtyard, the air perfumed by seasonal blooms. Who knows what, if any, influence Gardner may have had on the young Bertha. Surely, her vital, independent presence would have been hard to miss. Not as moneyed and maybe not as worldly as “Mrs. Jack,” Bertha shared an ambitious genius for celebrating and commemorating creativity. Gardner passed away the year Bertha founded the Horn Book, and I’m certain that the spirit migrated from one luminous mind to another.

I wholly believe that Bertha, like editors Paul and Ethel Heins (who served sequential terms, from 1967 to 1985), would have been a key participant in the Simmons Center for the Study of Children’s Literature if its groundbreaking graduate degree program had existed in her lifetime. With the bow-tied Paul, I studied criticism, a course I now teach. With the professionally dressed Ethel, I studied the picture book, a focus of my scholarship and recent work with The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art.

About six months after Ethel hired me, behatted editor Anita Silvey and tufted Horn Book President Thomas Todd carefully advised me out of the job in which I was unhappy. I remain grateful for Anita’s mentorship then and now when we lunch at the Gardner. Her invitation to chair a Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards committee boosted my early academic career, and she gave similar career starts when she hired a trio of alumnae. She continues to act as adjunct faculty at Simmons, where student advocacy characterizes her teaching.

Even before he was editor, bow-tied and bright-stockinged Roger Sutton invited me to give my first keynote lecture on criticism in children’s literature at an Allerton Institute. I was (needlessly) apprehensive the first time he gave a class at Simmons when I noticed his lesson plan for a three-hour seminar consisted of four sentences scribbled in green Flair pen. As editor, Roger hired many of our graduates and mentored more as columnists and reviewers. He moved the Horn Book office to Simmons in 2014, where it remained until the Horn Book went remote.

Bertha’s legacy persists in current editor in chief, Simmons alumna Elissa Gershowitz. I remember Elissa’s perspicacity in my criticism class, and I reveled in uncanny delight when the boho-styled editor asked me to chair the 2024 Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards Committee. Her effervescence excites, and her vision will inspire — perhaps even into another century of Simmons-Horn Book relationships.

From the March/April 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine. The Horn Book celebrated its centennial in 2024. For more Horn Book centennial coverage, click here.

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