Biography & Beyond: Carol Hinz

Carol Hinz is Associate Publisher of Millbrook Press and Carolrhoda Books, divisions of Lerner Publishing Group in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She’s passionate about picture books, poetry, and nonfiction for young people, and she enjoys working with authors and illustrators who explore innovative approaches in their storytelling and encourage readers to see the world in new ways. She has worked with authors including Carole Boston Weatherford, Kao Kalia Yang, Irene Latham, Charles Waters, Traci Sorell, Miranda Paul, NoNieqa Ramos, and Patricia Newman.

The big goal of this session: To get authors to think about nonfiction as a malleable category with multiple possibilities. There are so many different ways to write a book and still fall under nonfiction. Hinz certainly met that goal with many samples!

Here are a few:

Informational books: defined as those written and illustrated to present, organize, and interpret documentable, factual material. 

Two key terms to remember: narrative tells a story with characters, story, and a plot. Expository describes, explains, or informs in a clear, accessible way.

5 Kinds of Nonfiction from nonfiction extraordinaire Melissa Stewart's Celebrate Science website: https://www.melissa-stewart.com/

Some types of biographies:

Cradle to grave focuses on one particular element or theme.

Zoom in on a moment

A Place To Land is a story that happens inside of 48 hours.

Tell a story backwards. In Before She Was Harriet, the author tells more of a grave to birth story.

Put your reader in someone else's shoes

Other ways to tell a biography:

--Tell a childhood story

--Focus only on adulthood

--Tell the past in the present tense

--Write to the books subject

--Write from your subjects perspective

--Tell a family story

--Put yourself in the story

--Tell your own story

--Tell a collective story

Other types of nonfiction

Acknowledge what we don't know. Sometimes, all the facts can't be discovered. Acknowledge so in the Afterwards explaining why. 

--Tell the story of a place

--Tell a story we think we know

In the case of All Thirteen, we know what happened and how the story ends,

but the author fills in what we don't know.

A full book list will be available soon