Visit the Mark Twain Boyhood Home in Hannibal, Missouri; follow a guided tour through Mark Twain Cave; ride a Mississippi Riverboat; and journey to Twain’s birthplace in Florida, Missouri: does this sound like the kind of professional development you’d give up a week of your summer for?

The Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum announces its second annual summer workshop series, June 16-20, July 14-18, and July 28-August 1.

Participants will spend a week exploring The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with scholars and local experts. You can earn graduate credits or continuing education units as you prepare a unit you can take back to your classroom in the fall.

And, of course, you can spend some time with the Mississippi River, as Twain did, and as Huck describes sunrise in this passage:

The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line — that was the woods on t’other side; you couldn’t make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then the river softened up away off, and warn’t black any more, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along ever so far away — trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks — rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by and by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there’s a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log-cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t’other side of the river, being a woodyard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh and sweet to smell on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they’ve left dead fish laying around, gars and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you’ve got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!

More information and a registration form are available.

The American Library Association sponsors Banned Books Week; this year, September 29 to October 6. Their slogan is “Free people read freely.”

Combining Banned Books Week with Hispanic Heritage Month, it seems appropriate to mention Rudolfo Anaya, whose Bless Me, Ultima, is listed as #75 of the Most Frequently Challenged Books, .

Comparable to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in many ways, Bless Me, Ultima, is the story of Antonio, a boy who matures as he struggles to reconcile two opposing religious viewpoints. Because he ultimately rejects Christianity in favor of traditional Native American beliefs and practices, the book is often challenged in schools.

Bless Me, Ultima was Anaya’s first novel, published in 1972. It was awarded the Premio Quinto Sol award, for which Anaya received $1000. Today it is considered a classic, and Anaya is often called “the father of Chicano literature.”

Anaya taught in public schools and served as a counselor at the University of Albuquerque before joining the faculty of the University of New Mexico in 1974. He continued to write novels, publishing Heart of Aztlan in 1976, Tortuga in 1979, The Legend of La Llorona in 1984, Albuquerque in 1992 (a winner of the PEN Center West Award for Fiction). He published Zia Summer in 1995, Rio Grande Fall in 1996, Jalamanta: A Message from the Desert, also in 1996, and Shaman Winter in 1999. Curse of the ChupaCabra was published in 2006.

Anaya has also published collections of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction.

He has received numerous awards throughout his career, including the Governor’s Award for Literature (1980), an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters Degree from the University of Albuquerque (1981), the Award for Achievement in Chicano Literature of the Hispanic Caucus of the National Conference of Teachers of English (1983), the W.K. Kellogg Foundation Fellowship (1983), the Mexican Medal of Friendship (1886), the New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities’ Excellence in the Humanities (1995), and the Luis Leal Award (2004). President George Bush awarded him a National Medal of Arts in 2002.

He retired from teaching in 1993.