Planners of the Annual Northrop Frye Festival are pleased to announce that Dr. Glenna Sloan of Garden City, New York is the keynote speaker at the 2008 Festival, April 22-27 in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada.

Northrop Frye (1913-1991) eminent Canadian scholar and thinker, earned worldwide fame as a literary and cultural critic. He as author of 30 acclaimed books, including Fearful Symmetry (1947), a highly original study of the poetry of poet William Blake and Anatomy of Criticism (1957), his influential treatise on literary symbolism and structure. Six talks he gave on literature and literacy development were broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Company and subsequently published as The Educated Imagination (1963). The book remains in print and can serve as a primer for scholars and lay persons interested in learning what Frye has to say about the role literature can and should play in the literacy and imaginative development of both children and adults.

The Frye Festival, held annually in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, where Frye was raised, brings together authors, scholars, storytellers, poets and playwrights from around the world. Festival audiences hear these speakers in speeches, debates, readings, workshops and dialogues in schools, theatres and libraries throughout the region.

Dr. Slogan, a professor of literacy and children's literature at Queens College, CUNY and Frye scholar, studied Northrop Frye's ideas in her doctoral studies at Columbia University's Teachers College and applied them to the literacy development of young children in her book, The Child as Critic (4th edition, 2003).