Eason, Alethea 1957-

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Eason, Alethea 1957-

Personal

Born 1957. Education: University of Redlands, B.A. (English and religion), 1974; Sonoma State University, multiple-subject teaching credential, 1986; Chico State University, reading and language-arts credential, 1991.

Addresses

Home and office—Concon, Chile. E-mail—[email protected].

Career

Writer and educator. Middletown Unified School District, Middletown, CA, teacher.

Awards, Honors

Eugene Ruggles Poetry Prize; "What's the Story" Contest winner, SRA/McGraw Hill Imagine It! Reading series, for "Turtle Soup."

Writings

Hungry, Eos (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor of stories to anthologies, including A Glory of Unicorns, Bruce Coville's Strange Worlds, and Bruce Coville's Alien Visitors.

Sidelights

As a teacher of English in California, as well as in Chile, where she instructs Spanish speakers in the English language, Alethea Eason hopes to encourage her students by sharing her own writing life with them. "I bring drafts of my work to show my students when I want to reinforce the need to rewrite," Eason explained

on her home page. "I think some of the kids are more willing to take chances at expressing themselves because they know me as a writer as well as a teacher."

Eason contributed short fiction to several middle-grade anthologies before producing her first novel, Hungry. Hungry grew out of the short story "Deborah's Choice," which first appeared in Bruce Coville's Alien Visitors. The novel introduced Deborah, a young alien living on Earth disguised as a human. Deborah's quandary is an unusual one: she must decide whether she can fulfill her duties to her home world by eating her best friend. Preparing for an invasion of earth, Deborah and her family have to feed on human beings every year on Halloween. The girl accepts that this is part of being an average alien until her parents insist that her best friend, Willy, be their latest victim. When Deborah now starts to question what she knows about her home world, she discovers that other people from her planet would rather have a peaceful coexistence with the inhabitants of Earth instead of continuing their quiet but violent invasion. Noting the parallels between Deborah's development and universal coming-of-age issues, Danielle M. Margarida wrote in School Library Journal that "Deborah's story has promise—after all, what 11-year-old doesn't feel like an alien at times?"