2013 Distinguished Author Award Given to Susan Campbell Bartoletti

The Royden B. Davis, S.J., Distinguished Author Award was given on September 7, 2013, to University of Scranton alumna Susan Campbell Bartoletti, award-winning writer for young readers.  Susan received her M.A. degree in English from the University in 1982 and served as an adjunct professor in that department, teaching children’s literature for several semesters.  A former junior high English teacher in the North Pocono School District, Susan tackles sensitive historical subjects in her non-fiction, writing about such controversial topics as children working in coal mines, the Irish potato famine, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Hitler Youth Movement.

 

Her first foray in writing was submitting short stories to the popular Highlights for Children, where her story “No Man’s Land” won a fiction contest in the magazine.  Encouraged by her success, Bartoletti chose the picture book genre as her first full length work, telling the tale of immigrant coal miners, based on the story of her grandfather-in-law’s life.  Although the book was not a critical success, much of the background research on the miners’ lives in Northeastern Pennsylvania led to her first full-length non-fiction work for older readers called Growing Up in Coal Country.   The book won a Golden Kite Award for non-Ffction and found a readership in both young and more mature readers.  Accompanied by photographs by Lewis Hine, who was hired by the National Child Labor Committee to capture real life examples of child labor in early twentieth century America, the book provides an intimate look at what working and living in coal camps and company towns were like for children and adults.

 

The success of Coal Country fueled Bartoletti’s passion for connecting with young readers and she turned her talents back to picture books, this time telling the tale of a Polish immigrant and her young granddaughter.  Dancing with Dziasziu, and the succeeding Christmas Promise, Nobody’s Nosier than a Dog and Nobody’s Diggier than a Dog secured her career as a bona fide author and, as is often the wish of all serious writers, allowed her to “quit her day job” teaching eighth grade English to pursue her doctorate in English from SUNY Binghamton and earn a living as a writer.

 

Bartoletti reworked the short story first published in Highlights into a full length book featuring the young recruits from both sides in the Civil War, who come together to play a makeshift baseball game.  In No Man’s Land, we see evidence of careful research into the living conditions experienced by the Union and Rebel soldiers.  The story comes to life as the main characters mature, losing their boyish illusions of the glories of war, making the novel appealing to adults and children alike.

 

Next came Kids on Strike, which chronicled the real life experiences of child laborers from 1836 through the early twentieth century in a range of industries – the bootblacks in New York, the anthracite coal miners in Northeast Pennsylvania, and the millworkers in Massachusetts.  Once again, thorough research of primary sources and the addition of more Lewis Hine photos resulted in an accurate portrayal of children who battled the system—whether it was the factory managers or the mine company owners and their underlings—to make a change in the working conditions of all who were to come after them.

 

Bartoletti contracted with Scholastic Publishers to write several books in the series Dear America, which featured historical fiction based on the lives of immigrants who lived in all parts of the developing nation.  A Coal Miner’s Bride was the first, telling the story of a thirteen year old girl who comes to Lattimer, Pennsylvania via an arranged marriage.  Her new husband is killed in a mining accident, and there is no shortage of descriptions of the dire conditions experienced by the workers at the time.  The real-life Lattimer Massacre, where nineteen miners are murdered during a protest, is the basis for the climax of the book.

 

As part of her doctoral dissertation, Bartoletti next journeyed to Ireland, where she researched the oral histories and emigration records of the potato famine period.  The work evolved into the award winning Black Potatoes which, according to Hazel Rochman’s review in the journal Booklist, “humanizes the big event by bringing the reader up close to the lives of ordinary people.”   During her acceptance speech at the American Library Association Annual Conference in Atlanta in 2002, where she was given the Robert Seibert Award for non-fiction, Susan recounted her experiences in culling through the archives in the Dublin libraries dealing with personal accounts of the abject hunger and despair that were routine for many of the peasants in the west of the country during the famine.  She relayed that those first hand narratives of starvation she read each day caused her to consume more than her usual intake for supper each night.  On her return to the United States she had gained ten pounds!

 

Continuing with her fascination for bringing historical events and individuals to a young audience without the drudgery of the dates and battle names so routine in social studies textbooks, Susan brought the lives of the young newspaper hawkers to the page in another Scholastic read called the Journal of Finn Reardon, a Newsie and uncovered the story of the women who constructed the gigantic flag that marked Ft. McHenry during the War of 18212 in The Flag Maker.   Two sensitive and controversial subjects are covered in her later works: Hitler’s Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow and The Boy Who Dared  (about the Holocaust) and They Called Themselves the KKK: the Birth of an American Terrorist Group, about a most unsettling time between 1865 and 1877 when the Klan was at its most powerful.  Newspaper articles, congressional hearings, diaries, and other primary source materials form the basis for much of Susan’s background for these books, but she uses the voice of a young person to provide the narrative and conflict in order to make a most difficult subject relatable to readers who may have only accessed the historical facts through a paragraph or

brief chapter in their history textbooks.  Carefully chosen photographs, engravings, and diary pages emphasize the reality of the events in each book and draw even the most reluctant reader into the storyline with relevant illustrations to explain what is happening.

 

More recently, Bartoletti has returned to the picture book genre with Naamah and the Ark at Night, focusing on a biblical character, Noah’s wife, who has little mention in the Old Testament.  Her latest work, another Dear America contribution, has its starting point in Scranton, where the daughter of a wealthy coal mining family faces uncertainty when her parents perish in an accident and she and her younger brother, who has Down’s syndrome, relocate to 1871 Chicago, where the infamous fire and other treacherous living conditions complicate their existence.  The diary entry format of Down the Rabbit Hole is in keeping with the series’ stylistic guidelines, giving the young reader insight into the times that no textbook could hope to supply.

 

In addition to her above mentioned degrees, Bartoletti attended Keystone College and earned a B.A. from Marywood University. She also received an M.F.A from Spaulding University in Louisville, Kentucky.   She resides in Moscow with her husband, Joseph, a high school history teacher and Scranton alumnus. She and Joe are parents of two—Brandy and Joe—and grandparents of three.