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On Megan Dowd Lambert's "Dave the Potter and Stevie the Reader" (from 2011)

by Elissa Gershowitz
Feb 22, 2017 | Filed in Articles & Opinion
Megan Dowd Lambert served on the 2011 Caldecott committee, which recognized Dave the Potter: Artist, Poet, Slave as a Caldecott Honor Book (that year's winner was A Sick Day for Amos McGee). Megan had been hesitant to share the book with her younger children: "I think perhaps I shied away from it as read-aloud fare for then four- and five-year-old Caroline and Stevie, thinking that they didn’t have the historical knowledge or maturity to grapple with the reality of Dave’s life as a slave." When she did share the book, however, she was surprised by Stevie's reaction. Megan's article "Dave the Potter and Stevie the Reader" originally appeared in the July/August 2011 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

Bryan Collier also won that year's Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award for Dave the Potter. You can find links to Collier's acceptance speech, along with a profile of the illustrator, here at Lolly's Classroom.


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This year's Horn Book holiday outing was at the Museum of Fine Arts, where we enjoyed a lovely lunch and toured the visiting exhibit Make Way for Ducklings: The Art of Robert McCloskey. Afterward we were free to wander, and I came across this example of Dave the Potter's work (it's possible I was listening in to a docent).


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Elissa Gershowitz

Elissa Gershowitz is editor in chief of The Horn Book, Inc. She holds an MA from the Center for the Study of Children's Literature at Simmons University and a BA from Oberlin College.

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