After a year of planning, Hickman was finally able to bring in award winning author Dashka Slater. A couple weeks ago Hickman students were given the opportunity to meet Dashka Slater and her work in an interview led by senior Clarity Millarsky.
“The district has worked with the unbound book festival in a program called Authors in Our Schools, where they team up with the book festival to…[bring] authors to our schools,” said librarian Sarah Neumann Henley.
The Unbound Book Festival is an event that occurs every year in which authors around the nation or even in some cases, the world, are brought to Columbia to share their experiences and their work. The author’s visit was not exclusive to Hickman and in the span of two days Dashka Slater was able to visit Hickman, Rock Bridge, Douglas and Battle.
“This was set up through the district. We set up the contract and got everything confirmed over the summer, and then the four high schools worked together on scheduling, looking at when audit terms were available,” said Sarah Neumann Henley.
Dashka Slater often writes about true stories of teenagers dealing with racism or other forms of discrimination, highlighting the issues many teenagers face. Dashka would be excited to speak in front of hundreds of high schoolers about her work. The district had planned Dashka Slater for over a year and took many efforts to bring her to Hickman. The presentation would not follow the traditional formal format.
“We chose to do [something] like a fireside chat, where it was more of a conversation between the author and one of our students asking questions,” said Sarah Neumann Henley.
The visit was planned as a chance for students to learn about this author and writing altogether in a format that probably made the experience easier to understand for students as the presentation was mostly student-led.
“I was drawn to ask her questions about what it meant to be an author rather than her books because not everybody in the audience had read those books,” said senior Clarity Millarsky.
Clarity researched Dashka’s work to inform her interview questions and translate her quality answers to the student body, why may have not read Dashka’s books. Clarity made other preparations by coming up with her own questions to ask the author. The presentation lasted 45 minutes and a few classes got the chance to learn about the view points of an author like Dashka Slater.
“I tried to ask her questions about how she responds to criticism or how she’s developed as a writer,” said Clarity.
Clarity was more focused on her process as a writer instead of questions about specific topics that most people would not understand. Clarity focused on leading the interview in a helpful and more educational direction that was helpful to potential writers in the audience.
“Why wouldn’t you want an author to come to your school and talk to your students to be able to see what it is to be in that role, just like so many other roles we bring in from the community,” said Sarah Neumann Henley.
