Park School librarian Laura Amy Schlitz and her book, Splendors and Glooms, have won a 2013 Newbery Honor for excellence in children's literature. A Newbery Honor is basically an honorable mention for the Newbery Medal, which Schlitz won in 2008 for Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Park will honor Schlitz with an impromptu celebration at 3 pm in, of course, the library.  

On Sunday, a few hundred of Richard Ben Cramer’s friends, family, colleagues, and admirers gathered for a memorial service at Washington College’s Gibson Center for the Performing Arts in Chestertown. The acclaimed writer/journalist, who passed away January 7, had said he didn’t want a somber gathering and master of ceremonies Adam Goodheart promised an upbeat affair with “no tears or ‘Amazing Grace’ on the bagpipes.”

The service began with a recording of Cramer, with that fine-grade sandpaper voice, talking about Sunday school, where he learned mostly about “tyrants trying to do in the Jews. But then God showed up and smote them a mighty smite and things were better until next Sunday when the Jews were in trouble again.” As a result, he said, Jewish holidays “pretty much all add up to the same thing—they tried to kill us, they didn’...

What piece of art changed your life? How did it affect you?

Alan Lomax's The Land Where the Blues Began.

I first read LWBB when I was a sophomore in high school. It opened me up to a whole world of American history, religion, music, and dance, all interdependent and intertwined. I immediately went out and found as many of the artists and recordings in that book as possible. (This was before wikipedia, mind you.) My academic research in anthropology is indebted to Lomax’s fearless and selfless song-searching in the Mississippi Delta. It stoked my personal fire; here I was, a white suburban Jewish teenager in the 90’s/2000’s, daughter of a hippie and a professor, with a physical connection to R&B and hip-hop, and a deep connection to prison chants and blues songs. Like all teenagers, I was trying to figure out who I...

Baltimore native Anna Deveare Smith will pocket $300,000 as this year's recipient of the Dorothy & Lillian Gish Prize. Smith, a Western grad, appears in Nurse Betty, but she's best known for brilliant one-woman shows such as Fires in the Mirror and Let Me Down Easy, a highlight of Arena Stage's 2011 season. Smith's Aunt Lorraine, a retired Baltimore school teacher and character in Let Me Down Easy, must be proud.