That was one of the threads that eventually led to my interest in multicultural literature…” The final influence came from Bishop’s work as a graduate research assistant to Wayne State professor Ken Goodman, who was also her advisor. I remember wanting to read them all, see what they were like, what sorts of topics and themes were dealt with, and how African Americans were represented. Bishop later recalled, “…it was the first time I had seen so many children’s books about African Americans together in one place. The display was called “The Darker Brother Collection” after the Langston Hughes poem, I, Too. Donald Bissett of Wayne State’s Children’s Literature Center, coordinated a display of 40+ children’s books featuring African Americans at the fair.
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The Detroit Free Press sponsored an annual book fair. Here she first encountered a large collection of African American children’s literature. The next memorable occasion happened while Bishop was a graduate student at Wayne State University. The first influence came when one of her freshman college roommates, Patricia Grasty Gaines, introduced her to Marguerite de Angeli’s Bright April (1946), the first children’s book Bishop read with characters that looked and experienced community life similar to her own. īishop has credited a few influences on her evolving work around multicultural children’s literature. At the college and university level, Bishop taught reading, curriculum development, and children’s literature at Morgan State College in Baltimore, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the State University of New York at Buffalo and Ohio State University, where Bishop specialized in children’s literature, particularly African American children’s literature. She taught elementary school for a few years. Later she obtained her doctorate from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. She completed her master’s degree in education from the University of Pennsylvania. One area open to her was teaching.Īfter graduating from Pottsville High School, Bishop attended West Chester State Teachers College (now West Chester University of Pennsylvania).
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The public schools in her community were not racially segregated, though Bishop noted that professional opportunities were limited for African Americans at the time. Bishop was born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, about a hundred miles northwest of Philadelphia.