Join us for a explorative workshop designed for young writers (13+) with author J. Albert Mann entitled Little Decisions Feed Big Ideas: Tools of the Writing Process. J. will read from her forthcoming middle grade novel, The DEGENERATES, discuss her creative process, and workshop your drafts in progress. Audience Q&A will follow.

Please bring a draft and writing materials! 
In the tradition of Girl, Interrupted, this fiery historical novel follows four young women in the early 20th century who are locked up in the Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded—simply because their society has shunned the poor, the disabled, and the marginalized.
The Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded is not a happy place. The young women who are already there certainly don’t think so. Not Maxine, who is doing everything she can to protect her younger sister Rose from an institution where vicious attendants and bullying older girls treat them as the morons, imbeciles, and idiots. Not Alice, either, who was left there when her brother rejected a sister with a club foot. And not London, who has just been dragged there from the best foster situation she’s ever had, thanks to one unexpected, life altering moment. Each girl is determined to change her fate, no matter what it takes. This novel is a moving exploration of feminism, disability, and the dangers of marginalizing those who are “different.”

J. Albert Mann an award-winning poet and the author of six published novels for children. She has an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young Adults, and is the Director of the WNDB Internship Grant Committee. Her next work, The DEGENERATES, a novel of historical fiction about the mass institutionalization of disabled children (eugenics movement), publishes this March with Simon & Schuster’s Atheneum Books for Young Readers. She is also the author of short stories and poems for children featured in Highlights for Children, where she won the Highlights Fiction Award, as well as the Highlights Editors’ Choice Award.