School Visits
Due to the continued spread of COVID-19, I will not be scheduling any in-person school visits for the 2020-21 school year. I say this with a tremendous amount of sadness — visiting schools and classrooms, for me, is the best part of the job of a children’s author. This is still a fluid situation, and this is all subject to guesswork and change. For future reference — and for when the world goes back to normal — I will be delighted when our nation’s scientists and doctors create the conditions to allow for me to start scheduling school visits again. I charge $5,000 for a full day, plus airfare and hotel. A typical visit day consists of four separate sessions throughout the day, with groups ranging from large assembly presentations to single-class writing workshops, to multi-class Q&A sessions, to intimate small-group discussions, to after-school workshops for teachers. Feel free to toss me a note through my contact form, and we can discuss the details of what a future visit might look like.
Virtual School Visits
I am scheduling virtual school visits for the 2020-21 school year. These visits are 45-50 minutes long, consisting of a presentation on the writing process – from idea generation to the writer’s notebook to research to revision – and a Q&A session.
Virtual Writing Workshops
I am also scheduling virtual writing workshops – tailored to fit the age, skill level and interest of each specific group. Workshops range from fairy tales to science fiction/fantasy worldbuilding to using memory as a starting point in fiction to a workshop that I like to call “Low-Impact Storytelling”, in which the students generate a sizeable list of first lines, and use them to write the opening of brand new stories. Workshops are structured to last 45-50 minutes.
Both the virtual visits and the virtual writing workshops cost $750.