Amy loves speaking to both young readers and adults about writing, history, and the creative process. An enthusiastic and experienced presenter, she has been a guest on public radio programs and television. Her lectures and workshops have taken her from coast to coast in the United States, from Harvard's Sackler Museum to the Los Angeles Public Library, as well as many wonderful independent bookstores, classrooms, and lecture halls in between.
Amy loves speaking to both young readers and adults about writing, history, and the creative process. An enthusiastic and experienced presenter, she has been a guest on public radio programs and television. Her lectures and workshops have taken her from coast to coast in the United States, from Harvard's Sackler Museum to the Los Angeles Public Library, as well as many wonderful independent bookstores, classrooms, and lecture halls in between.
Amy deeply appreciates every invitation to speak, but she’s able to book only a few in-person engagements each year. If you would like her to visit your school, library, museum, bookstore, or organization, either in-person or via the internet, please contact her to discuss presentation topics, scheduling, fees, and the special needs or interests of your group.
You can also contact Amy about virtual visits, which are a great way to meet an author. These tend to follow one of the following formats:
Meet the Author: In these sessions, Amy talks about the life of a writer and answers questions from your group. The sessions last for 15-20 minutes. The only requirement is that your group or class has read one of Amy’s books (or had it read to them), since they get more out of the talk that way. It usually works best if the questions are selected in advance! (Note: Amy is only able to do a limited number of these talks each year, and these slots go quickly.)
Virtual Visit: Amy also offers a longer visit of 45-60 minutes. This can be a longer version of the “Meet the Author” session above, or a talk focused on one of her books, with a Q&A at the end. Talks can be tailored to your group’s needs.
This playful, writing-intensive workshop focuses on ways to get different parts of the brain involved in writing. Scientists have shown that when we’re writing, we often rely only on the orderly part of our brain that handles logic and language. The parts of our brain that deal with art and imagination and intuition are also important, but they can be much harder to harness. Without them, however, our writing may be dull and lifeless.
After talking a bit about the science behind writing, Amy leads the group through a series of exercises that engage the "hidden" part of our brains and that have been shown to help us write when we feel we have nothing to say or no way to say it. It's exciting to see people's faces light up as they discover a secret back door into writing.
How do you build a story? In this workshop, Amy turns shares some writing “Rules of Three” that will help children write satisfying stories of their own. Using the tale of the Three Little Pigs as a model, she teaches the basic building blocks of character, conflict, and plot. Together with Amy, the class then builds another story based on these rules. We have great fun—and learn a lot — as we brainstorm new characters and conflicts and use a “try, try, and try again” framework to get to our happy ending.
In this presentation, Amy talks partly about her own journey as a writer, starting with the stories she wrote and the journals she kept when she was a kid. She also uses photos, illustrations, and props to explain how writers go from an idea to a finished book. Imagination, research, and revision are the points she emphasizes, and with that in mind she shares old maps and drawings she used for research, early outlines, and manuscript pages with scribbled revision notes and editorial comments. She ends by answering questions about her books and the writing life.
This lively slide presentation is a visual feast that tells the story of the color red — from Cro-Magnon cave-art and Pompeiian frescoes to Renaissance masterpieces to 20th-century fashion — and delves into the mysteries of cochineal, the most powerful natural red dye in the world. Amy brings cochineal and hand-dyed cochineal silks with her when she travels, so that audiences can see this mysterious red for themselves, and understand why it was one of the world’s greatest luxuries for so long.