Michelle Martin is an Associate Professor of English at Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina, where she teaches courses in Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Women’s Literature. She is the author of Brown Gold: Milestones of African-American Childrens Picture Books, 1845-2002 (Routledge, 2004) and co-editor with Claudia Nelson of Sexual Pedagogies: Sex Education in Britain, Australia, and America, 1879-2000 (Palgrave, 2003).

Her current research project, Dream Keepers for Children of the Sun: The Children’s Literature of Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, will offer a critical analysis of the children’s texts of these two well-known authors - a substantial body of literature that has been underappreciated and excluded from both the African American and Children’s Literature canons. A chapter of this work will be published in Jonda McNair and Wanda Brooks’s forthcoming anthology, Embracing, Evaluating and Examining African American Children’s and Young Adult Literature.

Professor Martin joins us as the Betsy Beinecke Shirley Visiting Fellow; the Betsy Beinecke Shirley Fellowship in American Children’s Literature honors the renowned collector for whom it is named and celebrates her rich collection of books, manuscripts, and artwork documenting the storied history of children’s literature in the United States.