Author Visits
Having Marti Dumas visit BRiMS was a big step this year. As it was the very first author visit of the school year. The pandemic has not made it easy to plan and execute the usual library programming that crowds the calendar. Marti was a 5th grade teacher in the elementary school where Ms. Kahn was a librarian for many years. We found out that Marti taught for 13 years at every elementary age level. She has been a storyteller for a long time and would extend beloved books of her students by continuing the story or writing parts that were missing. When she began her career as a published writer, she knew that she wanted to write books with diverse characters. For each book, she knows the audience who she wants to please. Her first work, Jala and the Wolves, was for her daughter who was six at the time. What makes her work so special is that she uses sophisticated vocabulary and rich language even though her target audience is young. Her most recent book is Women in the Old West, and she explained about the intense research it took to write a 48 page book. She surmised that only about 2% of what she found ended up in the book. Thank you Marti for taking time to visit with BRiMS!