Author Bio
Laban Carrick Hil's America Dreaming: How Youth Changed America in the 60s will be published in November 2007 by Little, Brown and Co. The book is a cultural history of the sixties and its legacy. His most recent young-adult novel, A Brush with Napoleon (Watson-Guptil 2007), has been praised by School Library Journal as "subtle" and "dramatic." In 2006, Hill's young adult novel Casa Azul was chosen by The New York Public Library as a Best Book for the Teen Age. His Harlem Stomp! A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance (Little, Brown 2004) received more than 25 awards and honors, including a 2004 National Book Award Finalist, a Parent's Choice Gold Award, and more than five selections for best books of the year lists. Hill has written more than 25 books for children, young adults, and adults. His book-length poem Dave the Potter will be turned into a picture book by Little, Brown in 2008.A poet as well as a fiction and nonfiction writer, Laban has written critical biographies on the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, the Southern novelist Bobbie Ann Mason, and the poet Jane Kenyon. His poems have been included in Contemporary Poetry of New England, an anthology edited by Jay Parini, as well as in numerous literary magazines. Laban is currently a core faculty member at Pine Manor College MFA in Creative Writing and at Vermont College Undergraduate Program. He has taught literature and writing at Columbia University, Baruch College, St. Michael's College, University of Vermont.