Michelle H. Martin

A native of South Carolina, Dr. Michelle H. Martin, the Beverly Cleary Endowed Professor for Children and Youth Services in the Information School at the University of Washington, is making her debut as a picture book author, focusing on family stories on topics as diverse as swimming, southern food, and spending time outdoors. She writes reviews regularly for Horn Book and Kirkus and is a 2024 Kirkus Prize judge.

Martin has taught children’s literature for more than 30 years and loves inspiring the next generation of librarians, teachers, and children’s literature enthusiasts. She was the inaugural Augusta Baker Endowed Chair in Childhood Literacy at the University of South Carolina from 2011 to 2016 and is widely published in academia, with articles in the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, The Lion and the Unicorn, JELIS, Children & Libraries, and more.

She is the author of Brown Gold: Milestones of African American Children’s Picture Books, 1845-2002 (Routledge, 2004) and is publishing a co-edited anthology with Sarah Layzell and Tammy Mielke in 2025 with University of Mississippi Press titled Song of the Land: Critical Perspectives on the Works of Mildred D. Taylor. Martin is currently working on Dream Keepers for Children of the Sun: the Children’s Literature of Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes, a book-length critical examination of the collaborative and individual works that Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes wrote for young people during their 40-year friendship and collaborative working relationship.

Martin is also the co-founder of Camp Read-a-Rama (www.Read-a-Rama.org), a non-profit that uses children’s literature as the springboard for all programming activities, including summer day camps for children ages 4 to 11—an organization that is “making the U.S. more literate, one child and one book at a time.”