I received my Ph.D. as a specialist in Victorian literature from Yale (1969 — I did a dissertation on the poetry of Tennyson-- but since about 1975 I've concentrated on teaching and writing about children's literature (for further information about why, see the article in the University of Winnipeg Alumni Journal). I taught in the English department at the University of Winnipeg for 37 years, from 1968 to 2005, and am now Professor Emeritus. I've published about a hundred or so articles on various aspects of children's literature in scholarly journals, many of them focussing on literary theory as a context for understanding books for children. I've also written three books on the subject: Words About Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children's Picture Books, The Pleasures of Children's Literature, a textbook used in universities across North America and elsewhere (I wrote the latest, third edition of Pleasures in collaboration with Mavis Reimer), and The Hidden Adult: Defining Children's Literature. Words about Pictures has been translated into Greek. Pleasures has been translated into Chinese for use in Taiwan and also into Korean. I have been Editor of two academic journals, the Children's Literature Association Quarterly for five years (1983-87), and CCL/LCJ, the Canadian children's literature journal for five years (2004-2008). I have also been President of the Children's Literature Association, and currently serve on the Editorial Boards of Jeunesse, IRCL, and The Journal of Children's Literature Studies. As a writer of children's and young adult fiction