Bartoletti, Susan Campbell 1958-

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Bartoletti, Susan Campbell 1958-

Personal

Born November 18, 1958, in Harrisburg, PA; married Joseph Bartoletti (a history teacher); children: Brandy, Joe. Education: Attended Keystone College; Marywood College, B.A. (English and secondary education), 1979, and graduate study; University of Scranton, M.A. (English), 1982; State University of New York—Binghamton, Ph.D., 2001.

Addresses

Home—PA. Agent—Curtis Brown, Ltd., 10 Astor Place, New York, NY 10003.

Career

Writer. North Pocono Middle School, Moscow, PA, English teacher, 1979–97; Hollins University, Roanoke, VA, visiting associate professor of creative writing in graduate program in children's literature, 1999—.

Awards, Honors

Highlights for Children fiction contest winner, 1993, for "No Man's Land"; Jane Addams Children's Book Award, American Library Association (ALA) Notable Book designation, ALA Best Book for Young Adults designation, Golden Kite Honor Book for Nonfiction, Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, Carolyn Field Award, Pennsylvania Library Association, Booklist, Editor's Choice Award, Notable Children's Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies, National Council for the Social Studies/Children's Book Council (NCSS/CBC), Orbis Pictus Recommended Title, National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), Lamplighter Award, and Parents Gold Choice Award, all for Growing up in Coal Country; Best Books of 1999, School Library Journal, ALA Best Book for Young Adults designation, Notable Book designation, Smithso-

nian magazine, Books for the Teen Age designation, New York Public Library, Jane Addams Children's Book Honor Award, Carolyn Field Honor Award, Orbis Pictus Recommended Title, Notable Children's Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies, NCSS/CBC, and Jefferson Cup Recommended Title, all for Kids on Strike!; No- table Children's Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies, NCSS/CBC, 1999, for No Man's Land; Books for the Teen Age designation, New York Public Library, 2000, for A Coal Miner's Bride; named Outstanding Pennsylvania Author of the Year, Pennsylvania Library Association, 2001; Robert F. Sibert Award, ALA/Bound to Stay Bound Books, 2002, for Black Potatoes; Orbis Pictus Honor Book designation, Sydney Taylor Notable Book designation, Newbery Honor Book designation, and Robert F. Sibert Honor Book designation, all 2006, all for Hitler Youth.

Writings

NONFICTION

Growing up in Coal Country, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1996.

Kids on Strike!, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1999.

Black Potatoes: The Story of the Great Irish Famine, 1845–1850, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2001.

Hitler Youth: Growing up in Hitler's Shadow, Scholastic (New York, NY), 2005.

FICTION

No Man's Land: A Young Soldier's Story, Blue Sky Press (New York, NY), 1999.

A Coal Miner's Bride: The Diary of Anetka Kaminska, Scholastic (New York, NY), 2000.

The Journal of Finn Reardon, a Newsie, Scholastic (New York, NY), 2003.

PICTURE BOOKS

Silver at Night, illustrated by David Ray, Crown Books (New York, NY), 1994.

Dancing with Dziadziu, illustrated by Annika Nelson, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1997.

The Christmas Promise, illustrated by David Christiana, Blue Sky Press (New York, NY), 2001.

Nobody's Noisier than a Cat, illustrated by Beppe Giacobbe, Hyperion (New York, NY), 2003.

The Flag Maker, illustrated by Claire A. Nivola, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2004.

Nobody's Diggier than a Dog, illustrated by Beppe Giacobbe, Hyperion (New York, NY), 2005.

Sidelights

Susan Campbell Bartoletti is a writer whose strength lies in looking back rather than ahead. Bartoletti writes stories that empower the young as well as novels, non-fiction, and picture books that inspire and nudge young readers to look into history and see themselves in its reflection. Often using her native Pennsylvania as the setting for her books, Bartoletti has made a specialty of labor history, more specifically of tales from the coal mines that warren the underworld of Pennsylvania.

Hers are not the usual tales of the rugged coal miner, or of rapacious coal company owners. Instead, Bartoletti focuses on what she terms the "gaps" in history: the everyday lives of women and children of the coal mining era. With the nonfiction books Growing up in Coal Country and Kids on Strike! she delves into the world of child labor in the anthracite coal industry. In fiction titles such as A Coal Miner's Bride: The Diary of Anetka Kaminska, Bartoletti reveals the hardships and political turmoil present in one coal mining community through the eyes of a young immigrant girl. In her debut picture book, Silver at Night, she tells a fictionalized account of her husband's grandfather, who immigrated from Italy and spent nearly half a century in the mines of Pennsylvania.

The versatile Bartoletti has gone further afield in both fiction and nonfiction: to the U.S. Civil War for No Man's Land: A Young Soldier's Story, and to Ireland for Black Potatoes: The Story of the Great Irish Famine, 1845–1850. "I let my instinct tell me whether the story is fiction or nonfiction, picture book or novel," Bartoletti noted in the online Meet Authors and Illustrators. Regardless of the genre, Bartoletti's message remains the same. "Many books show kids as disenfranchised victims," she related in an interview with Authors and Artists for Young Adults (AAYA). "But that is not the whole story. In the coal mines, in the Civil War, there were many who fought for their rights. They weren't powerless. They did not always need adults to lead the way. And it's important that kids get that message. For their future, they need to see that other kids have power and can be powerful."

Born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1958, Bartoletti and her family moved several times after the death of her father in 1959. Basically, she grew up in the countryside outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania, enjoying the freedom of open land with few urban restrictions placed on her. Two main pastimes ordered her young life. "I loved to read and draw as a kid," the author once said. "Those were my main passions." Ironically, for a writer who would later make her mark mining the ore of the past, history was not Bartoletti's favorite subject in school. "I guess it serves me right that later I not only chose to write history, but I also married a history teacher," she noted in her interview.

Bartoletti took early encouragement in reading from her mother, who started reading to her children before they could even hold a book. Favorite titles included Tom Sawyer, The Jungle Book, Little Women, Harriet the Spy, the "Nancy Drew" books and the "Little House on the Prairie" books. "But I would read anything," Bartoletti noted. "When you really love to you read you'll read lists, even cereal boxes. And even though I didn't like history class, I read lots of history as a kid, both nonfiction and fiction."

A good student in school, Bartoletti also had an independent mind, and as a sixteen-year-old junior she decided to skip her senior year and enter college. "I ma- jored in art in college," she explained. "I got good grades in my art classes, but I could see the difference in talent between me and some of the others." Meanwhile she was earning high praise from her composition instructor, with her essays were read aloud as models. "So I switched majors," Bartoletti recalled. "I became an English major. It was meant to be."

Bartoletti landed a job teaching eighth-grade English as soon as she graduated from college. "I didn't think I was going to like teaching in a junior high where I got my first job," Bartoletti once stated. "I figured I would rather teach older kids. But I grew to love teaching. I stayed for eighteen years."

Bartoletti blended her enjoyment of writing with her teaching, and began writing short stories. Soon she began selling short fiction to various magazines, including Highlights for Children. When one of her stories, "No Man's Land," won a fiction contest in that magazine, Bartoletti began to think seriously about writing book-length fiction for children. Though she later adapted her award-winning short story into a juvenile novel, Bartoletti chose the picture-book format for her first longer work. She also chose a subject that she had learned about from many dinner conversations with her husband's grandfather.

"Although Silver at Night is fiction, the story was inspired by my husband's family, who were immigrant coal miners. His grandfather, Massimino Santarelli, came to the United States from Italy when he was nine, and he quit school at age eleven to work in the coal industry." This grandfather was full of stories about working in the mines, and the grandmother, Pearl, also had tales of being a miner's wife. Bartoletti gathered some of these stories for her picture book, and then shopped the manuscript to ten publishers before the book found a home at Crown. Silver at Night tells the story of Massimino as he leaves his country to make his fortune in the New World. He departs from his village and his one true love, promising that some day he will be a rich man with "gold in the morning and silver at night." In his new country, Massimino works in the coal mines by day and at night he counts the silver coins he has earned, also longing for his lost love. "First-time author Bartoletti throngs the simple story with an avalanche of fulsome imagery," noted a reviewer for Publishers Weekly.

"The reviews for that first book were awful," Bartoletti related. "In fact, they stopped me creatively for several months. I started a quilt for my daughter as a creative outlet. But in the end, the quilt went unfinished and I went back to my writing." It took, however, another two years before her second book was published.

Writing Silver at Night inspired Bartoletti's interest in the anthracite coal industry. As she read about the mining industry, she discovered one of the historical "gaps" she has tried to fill with her own words. "As I began to read more and more about coal mining, I found that most books concentrated on what it was like to be a wealthy and powerful coal operator, or what the hardships were of being a miner. However, few told what it was like to be a child in that industry, and fewer still what it was like to be a female then." Bartoletti began reading newspapers of the period, as well as magazines, autobiographies, diaries, and interview transcripts of oral histories. She also examined collections of photographs and even began collecting her own oral-history interviews. These first-hand accounts of life in the coal fields excited her and showed her the way to new books.

In Growing up in Coal Country she presents "a concise, thoroughly researched account of working and living conditions in Pennsylvania coal towns," observed Horn Book critic Anne Deifendeifer. In the first half of the book, Bartoletti describes the various jobs existing in a coal camp, from those performed by young boys to those of adult miners. In the second half of the book she details life in the company town, drawing on the first-person source material that "provides a refreshing … frame of reference," as Deifendeifer noted. Full of anecdotes and personal histories, the book is also well illustrated with "compelling black-and-white photographs of children at work in the coal mines of north-eastern Pennsylvania about 100 years ago," according to Booklist contributor Hazel Rochman. These contemporary images were captured by well-known photographer Lewis Hine, who was hired by the National Child Labor Committee to document child labor in early twentieth-century America. Rochman also drew attention to the "heartfelt memories of long hours, hard labor, and extremely dangerous working conditions, as well as lighter accounts" included in Bartoletti's book. "As with most fine juvenile nonfiction," Rochman concluded, "this will also have great appeal for adults." Growing up in Coal Country won numerous awards, including a Golden Kite Honor Book award for nonfiction, and attracted a readership that bridges the generations.

Turning her hand to picture books once again, Bartoletti tells the story of Gabriella, who dances for the last time with her beloved elderly grandmother, Babci, in Dancing with Dziadziu. "Far from sad," wrote a contributor for Publishers Weekly, "the story is largely a celebration of Babci's life as a Polish immigrant." The same reviewer described this picture book as a "mellifluously written tale" featuring a "motif of rebirth" established with the family's early Easter celebration before the death of Babci. Reviewing the picture book in Booklist, Karen Morgan noted that, "In direct and uncomplicated language and through a series of flashbacks, Bartoletti captures the spirit of love and caring across generations." Further picture books from Bartoletti include The Christmas Promise, about a Depression age father and daughter in search of a home, and the humorous Nobody's Diggier than a Dog.

In 1998 Bartoletti left her job as an eighth-grade English teacher to commit herself to writing full time and to earn her doctorate in English. One of her first publications thereafter was the reworking of her prize-winning short story, "No Man's Land," about a makeshift baseball game between young Rebel and Yankee soldiers under a private truce during the U.S. Civil War. In the novel No Man's Land, she tells the story of fourteen-year-old Thrasher McGee, who lies about his age in order to join the Confederate Army. Searching for heroic adventures, Thrasher at first finds mostly boredom waiting for the battle. Arriving too late for one battle, he and his comrades are assigned the gory job of burying the dead. Echoing the original short story, one chapter details the friendly relations that develop between Yankee and Rebel troops until they are forced to fight each other once again. In the final climactic battle, Thrasher loses his arm and what little illusions he has left about the glory of warfare. "Bartoletti compellingly and carefully crafts her characters," noted a writer for Publishers Weekly, "especially the boys-turned-soldiers Thrasher, Baylor Frable and Trim LaFaye." The same reviewer concluded that Bartoletti "spins a history as fresh as the day it happened." Rochman also praised the novel, calling attention to Bartoletti's "careful historical research."

With Kids on Strike! Bartoletti again deals with children facing difficult adult circumstances, this time in a nonfiction format. An extension of her coal-industry research, this book examines child labor from 1836 to the early twentieth century as told through the stories of young people who rebelled against unfair working conditions. "I found the true stories of kids who discovered power when they banded together for a common cause," Bartoletti wrote in Book Links. "Sometimes they won big.… Sometimes they helped their parents win.… Sometimes they won small.… Often they did not win at all." Examining strikes from the New York boot-black action of 1899 to the Pennsylvania anthracite coals strikes of 1900 and 1902 and the mill workers' strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1913, the author focuses on the roles children played in such labor disputes. "Bartoletti has a gift for collecting stories with telling details," noted a contributor to Publishers Weekly. "Her dense but highly readable prose brings individual children and the struggles in which they engaged vividly to life." The same reviewer called Kids on Strike! "accessible and engrossing," and "tangible proof for would-be activists that children have made and continue to make a difference." Writing in Booklist, Hazel Rochman concluded that, "along with unforgettable photos by Lewis Hine and others on nearly every page, Bartoletti dramatizes the politics with individual stories of hardship and struggle." "As memorable as their inspiring stories are," commented a reviewer for Horn Book of the tales included in the author's chronicles, "they represent just a few of the children who worked and battled for better lives."

Returning to fiction with A Coal Miner's Bride, Bartoletti takes a "vivid and compelling look at the lives of Pennsylvania's immigrant coal miners and their fami-

lies at the turn of the [twentieth] century," wrote Valerie Diamond in a School Library Journal review. "I wrote about a spirited thirteen-year-old-girl," Bartoletti noted in Book Links, "whose father has arranged a marriage for her to … a man she does not know in Lattimer, Pennsylvania." Anetka thus immigrates to America in 1896 and keeps a diary of her experiences in her new country. As a miner's wife and the stepmother to three children, she recording the hardships of her new life. When her husband is killed soon after the marriage, Anetka must take in boarders in order to care for her small stepdaughters. She soon falls in love with a labor organizer, Leon Nasevich, and things come to a crisis during the Lattimer Massacre in which nineteen miners were killed during a march on September 10, 1987. "Bartoletti paints an accessible and evocative picture of life in a harsh era," Diamond concluded. Reviewing the novel in Booklist, Rochman commended this "dramatic" history, but found problems with the "format," wondering when the busy Anetka could find time to write in her diary. Rochman, however, went on to note that Bartoletti's historical note at the end "authenticates the account of the immigration, the labor struggle, the massacre, and the role of strong women."

Another approach to nonfiction includes Black Potatoes: The Story of the Great Irish Famine, 1845–1850, which also served as Bartoletti's doctoral dissertation. Researching the records and transcripts of oral history interviews in Dublin, she put together a presentation of the famine with a folklore basis, focusing again on personal stories, historical records and documents, and photographic illustrations to bring history alive for young readers. According to Booklist critic Rochman, "Bartoletti humanizes the big events by bringing the reader up close to the lives of ordinary people."

Bartoletti returns to historical fiction with The Journal of Finn Reardon, a Newsie, about a thirteen-year-old Irish teen who hawks newspapers on the streets of New York City. Set in 1899, the work follows the members of the impoverished Reardon family and their efforts to improve their dire financial circumstances. While aspiring journalist Finn works alongside fellow newsies Racetrack and Mush, his parents take on odd jobs to provide for their children. When Finn's father becomes gravely ill after he is exposed to dangerous chemicals while painting houses, Finn becomes the family bread-winner. "From the journal, readers get an idea of unscrupulous landlords, of the lack of basics (no bathrooms or running water in the apartments), and the constant insecurity of working people," noted Kliatt reviewer Claire Rosser, and School Library Journal contributor Carol A. Edwards stated that "the family's Irish background helps the story to become much more than a recitation of historical facts."

The flag that inspired Francis Scott Key to compose "The Star-Spangled Banner" is the subject of Bartoletti's picture book The Flag Maker, a fictional account of an historical episode. The story is told from the point of view of Caroline Pickersgill, whose mother, Mary, constructed the huge flag that flew over Fort McHenry during the War of 1812. "As a recounting both of the making of the flag and its role in the defense of Fort McHenry, the tale is impeccably told, with short lines that add tension and speed the action along," wrote Martha V. Parravano in Horn Book. Booklist critic Jennifer Mattson also offered a positive assessment of the work, writing: "Once the flag is finished, Bartoletti writes feelingly of the talismanic comfort it provides when Caroline glimpses it from afar during the British attack."

In Hitler Youth: Growing up in Hitler's Shadow, a Newbery Honor Book selection, Bartoletti looks at the horrors of Nazi Germany through the experiences of twelve individuals who were members of the Hitler Youth. The organization, which was mandatory for many German children and adolescents during World War II, trained young people to be followers of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. "Hitler recognized the natural energy, enthusiasm, and loyalty that young people possess," Bartoletti told Booklist interviewer Hazel Rochman. "He understood that they could be a powerful political force. Once properly indoctrinated, they could provide him with a limitless supply of leaders and followers." Using oral histories, diaries, and interviews, Bartoletti traces the development of the movement, which involved millions of youth, focusing on the period from 1933 to 1945. "Bartoletti lets many of the subjects' words, emotions, and deeds speak for themselves," remarked School Library Journal contributor Andrew Medlar, "bringing them together clearly to tell this story unlike anyone else has." A Publishers Weekly reviewer stated that the work "will allow readers to comprehend the circumstances that led to the formation of Hitler's youngest zealots."

"I like working with primary sources because they connect us in a way that individualizes history," Bartoletti told Booklist interviewer Rochman. "To write the ‘truth,’ a writer must research to the edges. Otherwise, she stays in the middle. That creates one-sided, voiceless stories with stereotypical characters—stories that are not fleshed-out reality, stories without depth and complexity."

"Story comes first for me," Bartoletti concluded in her AAYA interview. "I need to look at history in a way that makes sense, and one way of making sense is by following story, which is not always about chronology.… I choose a character or characters and I think that if I develop them honestly and truly, then readership will follow. But in the end, it is up to the individual reader to decide if I have succeeded. With these stories of hard times from another era, my primary goal

is not just to let kids of today see how easy they have it. Rather my hope is that I can give kids hope and courage with these stories."

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Bartoletti, Susan Campbell, interview with J. Sydney Jones for Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Volume 44, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 2002.

PERIODICALS

Book Links, August–September, 2000, Susan Campbell Bartoletti, "Exploring the Gaps in History," pp. 16–21.

Booklist, November 1, 1994, p. 505; December 1, 1996, Hazel Rochman, review of Growing up in Coal Country, p. 652; March 15, 1997, Karen Morgan, review of Dancing with Dziadziu, p. 1238; April 1, 1999, Hazel Rochman, review of No Man's Land: A Young Soldier's Story, p. 1424; December 1, 1999, Hazel Rochman, review of Kids on Strike!, p. 691; April 1, 2000, Hazel Rochman, review of A Coal Miner's Wife: The Diary of Anetka Kaminska, p. 1473; September 15, 2001, GraceAnne A. DeCandido, review of The Christmas Promise, p. 234; October 15, 2001, Hazel Rochman, review of Black Potatoes: The Story of the Great Irish Famine, p. 394; November 1, 2003, Abby Nolan, review of Nothing's Nosier than a Cat, p. 103; March 1, 2004, Jennifer Mattson, review of The Flag Maker, p. 1206; January 1, 2005, Jennifer Mattson, review of Nothing's Diggier than a Dog, p. 867; April 15, 2005, Hazel Rochman, review of Hitler Youth: Growing up in Hitler's Shadow, p. 1454; January 1, 2006, Hazel Rochman, "Susan Campbell Bartoletti" (interview), p. 80.

Horn Book, March–April, 1997, Anne Deifendeifer, review of Growing up in Coal Country, pp. 210–211; January–February, 2000, review of Kids on Strike!, p. 91; January–February, 2002, Margaret A. Bush, review of Black Potatoes, p. 91; May–June, 2004, Martha V. Parravano, review of The Flag Maker, p. 343; May–June, 2005, Roger Sutton, review of Hitler Youth, pp. 345–346.

Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2003, review of Nothing's Nosier than a Cat, p. 1171; April 1, 2004, review of The Flag Maker, p. 324; January 15, 2005, review of Nothing's Diggier than a Dog, p. 116.

Kliatt, July, 2003, Claire Rosser, review of The Journal of Finn Reardon, a Newsie, p. 8; September 15, 2003, Daniel J. Levinson, review of Kids on Strike!, p. 41; November, 2005, Maureen Griffin, review of Hitler Youth, p. 33.

Publishers Weekly, November 14, 1994, review of Silver at Night, p. 67; February 10, 1997, review of Dancing with Dziadziu, p. 83; May 31, 1999, review of No Man's Land, p. 94; November 29, 1999, review of Kids on Strike!, p. 72; September 24, 2001, review of The Christmas Promise, p. 53; May 3, 2004, "A Red-White-and-Blue Parade," review of The Flag Maker, p. 195; February 7, 2005, review of Nothing's Diggier than a Dog, p. 58; May 23, 2005, review of Hitler Youth, pp. 79–80.

School Library Journal, November, 1994, p. 72; February, 1997, p. 109; May, 1997, p. 92; December, 1999, pp. 144–145; August, 2000, Valerie Diamond, review of A Coal Miner's Bride: The Diary of Anetka Kaminska, p. 177; October, 2001, review of The Christmas Promise, p. 62; November, 2001, Mary R. Hoffmann, review of Black Potatoes, p. 168; October, 2003, Carol A. Edwards, review of The Journal of Finn Reardon, a Newsie, p. 158; December, 2003, Grace Oliff, review of Nothing's Nosier than a Cat, p. 103; April, 2004, Dona Ratterree, review of The Flag Maker, p. 102; February, 2005, Sally R. Dow, review of Nothing's Diggier than a Dog, p. 94; June, 2005, Andrew Medlar, review of Hitler Youth, p. 174.

Scientific American, December, 1997, p. 124.