Shana Mahaffey

November 24, 2009 at 12 noon in the Campus Center Student Lounge
(Parking is $2. See campus map.)

Shana Mahaffey lives in San Francisco, California, in part of an Edwardian compound that she shares with an informal cooperative of family, friends, and five cats.  She’s a survivor of catechism and cat scratch fever, and is a member of the Sanchez Grotto Annex, a writers’ co-op.

Sounds Like Crazy is as a darkly comic and ultimately healing story about Holly Miller, an Emmy Award winning cartoon voiceover performer who has actual voices in her head, multiple personalities who make her career a huge success, and shield her from a terrible secret in her past.

 

Guadalupe Valdés

November 30, 2009 at 3:30 p.m. in the Campus Center Student Lounge
(Parking is $2. See campus map.)

Guadalupe Valdés is the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education at Stanford University. Working in the area of applied linguistics, much of her work has focused on the English-Spanish bilingualism of Latinos in the United States and on discovering and describing how two languages are developed, used, and maintained by individuals who become bilingual in immigrant communities.

Dr. Valdés has investigated Latino students in elementary, middle school, high school and college leading to six books and more than 70 articles. Her book Con respeto: Bridging the distance between culturally diverse families and schools (Teachers College Press, 1996) examines the lives of K-3 English-language learners and their families. The book Learning and not Learning English (Teachers College Press, 2001) follows four middle-school students over a two-year period. Expanding Definitions of Giftedness: Young Interpreters of Immigrant Background (Lawrence Erlbaum,2003) focuses on high school students who serve as young interpreters for their parents, and her last book Developing minority language resources: The case of Spanish in California (Valdés, Fishman, Chavez & Perez, Multilingual Matters, 2006) examines Spanish language maintenance and instruction in both secondary and postsecondary institutions. Her book Bilingualism and Testing: A Special Case of Bias (Ablex Publishing Co.,1994) is seen as a timely classic that explores the growing challenge  of increased use of standardized tests. Her most recent book, Steps in the Journey: Latino Children Learning English will be published by Teachers College Press in the spring of 2010.

Sounds like Crazy and Con Respecto will be available at the Foothill College Bookstore, and can be purchased at a 20% discount. For more info on Shana and Sounds Like Crazy, visit shanamahaffey.com . For more info on Guadalupe Valdés, visit the Stanford University website.