Ethel’s Song has won the 2023 Paterson Prize for Books for Young People, Grades 7-12 and was named a 2023 Bank Street College Best Book…Facing the Enemy: How a Nazi Youth Camp Tested a Friendship, a Junior Library Guild selection, debuted December 5, 2023. Up next: Working on a YA novel in verse about how three young men–two New York Jews and one Mississippi black–worked together for social justice in Freedom Summer until their heinous murder by the KKK.
Voices of the Past
Poet, Author, Workshop Leader, Historian
Ancestors and others who came before us deserve to be remembered. They want to be remembered. They insist on being remembered. They place images full of sound, taste, touch, smell, and sight within our reach. They provide the space to recount our own voices of innocence with voices of experience. Through the writing of history, family history, local history, ethnic and cultural history, and memoir, explore your own voices of the past along with me. Join me in this journey to bring life to these voices and share them with our own and new generations.
History Writer and Poet
I first fell in love with history in the fourth grade in my hometown of Kearny, New Jersey. Our class had to write about our town’s future or past to help celebrate its centennial. I went to the Main Library, specifically to the Kearny Room, and found all sorts of facts that titillated me. But that year, too, we began academic study of history and I couldn’t get enough of it. A love of language soon followed and by the time I finished high school, my favorite subjects were German, Russian, and History.
Learn More about Barbara KrasnerWorkshops and Searchable Database Resources
Writing the Past Workshops
Everyone Has a Story to Tell
Writing the Past workshops offers writers of all genres and all levels the opportunity to bring the stories they’ve heard or imagined onto the page. Using the Amherst Writers & Artists (AWA) method, , we’ll meet online via Zoom using time-based prompts as inspiration. All material is considered fiction and all work receives responses about what resonates, what is memorable or sticks. There is no critique. AWA Certified Affiliate Barbara Krasner provides provide the prompts.
Holocaust Children's Literature
Since 1940, nearly 800 books about what has become known as the Holocaust have been published for children and young adults in the United States and Canada, excluding self-published and educational series titles. Educators, librarians, scholars, and others can now search this online database to find the best resources for classrooms, libraries, and research. This database is the foundation of Barbara Krasner’s Ph.D. in Holocaust & Genocide Studies dissertation, “Family, Hope, and Survival: The Persistence of Resistance and Rescue in Holocaust Children’s Literature, 1940-2020.”
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