Approaches and Challenges in Children's Literature: An Interview with Lissa Paul

Lissa Paul has authored, edited or co-edited seven books, including The Norton Anthology of Children's Literature (2005) and Keywords for Children's Literature (2011), has chapters in another nineteen and publishes and speaks widely internationally. She edited the Lion and the Unicorn between 2002 and 2009 and inaugurated the "Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry" in 2005. Her research is generously funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada and her new monograph, Eliza Fenwick: Early Modern Feminist was published by the University of Delaware Press in 2019. She is currently working on an edition of Fenwick's letters, and as an outgrowth of her research, Lissa is also working on projects related to the fugitive slave ads in the Barbados Mercury Gazette (1783-1828). As Lissa was a co-applicant on a winning British Library Endangered Archives Programme grant to digitize the papers, she is now doing archival research using the digitized versions of the Gazette. A second, more international edition of Keywords for Childrens Literature, co-edited with Philip Nel and Nina Christensen, is scheduled for publication by New York University Press early 2021. Zhang Shengzhen, a Fulbright visiting scholar at New York University (2019-2020), interviewed Lissa Paul on a wide range of topics in the field of children's literature, including critical approaches and new challenges in children's literature, Canadian children's literature, her editing career in children's literature, and her original research in Eliza Fenwick: Early Modern Feminist, Prof. Paul also argues the challenges arising from "education gone bad," as well as the importance of developing a global community of scholars in the field.