Who?
Scholar of children’s literature and comics. Best-known for work on radical and anti-racist children’s literature, Crockett Johnson, and Dr. Seuss – especially Was the Cat in the Hat Black?
Crockett Johnson
Learn about the creator of Barnaby and Harold and the Purple Crayon via my (archived) Crockett Johnson Homepage and other writings.
Nine Kinds of Pie
Recent Posts
- Harold vs. AI
Crockett Johnson would turn 119 today, and Harold (of purple crayon fame) turns 70 this fall. What does it mean to celebrate Johnson or Harold today? As I argue in “Turn off AI. Pick up a crayon,” it means to celebrate human creativity. In this piece, I suggest that Harold and the Purple Crayon is - On Being Banned, Strategic Censorship, and Telling the Truth
Back in April, US Defense Secretary Pete “Signal” Hegseth ordered 381 books removed from the US Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library. These included works read by young people—Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give—and scholarship on books for young people, such as Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence and - How to Resist the Lure of AI
AI is everywhere. This is a guide for students — my students, your students — and anyone who would like to resist the lure of AI. The more you know about large-language model (LLM) AI, the more reasons you discover to avoid using it — or, at least, to limit your use. So. Here are 9 ways