AMY ALZNAUER is an award-winning author and mathematics lecturer at Northwestern University. Her acclaimed children’s books include The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor, a New York Times Best Children’s Book; The Boy Who Dreamed of Infinity, a Booklist Top Ten Biography; and The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice, winner of the 2026 Mathical Award and chosen as a Best Book of the Year by the Evanston, Chicago, and New York public libraries. Her writing has also earned the Christopher Award and the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her debut middle-grade novel, which Katherine Applegate calls a “breathtaking triumph of a novel,” is Where the Wild Horses Are (a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection, with stars from Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal). Amy loves visiting schools and libraries to share her passion for stories.
Bookshelf
About the Visit
Amy offers interactive presentations that inspire and engage students while tying into multiple curriculum areas. Please see her current offerings below, which can be tailored to the needs of the school or library.
WHERE THE WILD HORSES ARE (Grades 3–6; ideal for 4th & 5th): Students will learn to see wild horses the way the people who track, protect, and gentle them do. Amy opens with a sweeping true story: horses first evolved in North America, vanished, and then became a large feral population again when horses were reintroduced by Spanish explorers and conquistadors. Students will meet the herds that still roam the American West today and the real mustang Dragonfly Amy’s daughter gentled and trained. Then the students will decode a government freeze brand using the alpha-angle system to uncover a mustang’s birth year and ID number; practice how to read a horse’s ears, eyes, and tail the way a gentler does; and learn some American Sign Language from the book. Along the way they’ll take on big questions: what does it mean to be wild, how do we come to know another living creature, how does reading lead us into the wild? Connects to animal structures and behavior, western U.S. history and geography, and various languages (spoken, written, symbolic like animal freeze brands and mathematics, kinesthetic like horses use, visual-spatial like ASL).
THE FIVE SIDES OF MARJORIE RICE (Grades 2–6): Marjorie Rice had no math training past high school. Working at her kitchen table, she discovered incredible shapes that professional mathematicians had missed. “Amateur” comes from the Latin word for lover, and Amy uses Marjorie’s story to show that loving a problem can be the most powerful credential of all. Students will see how tiling shapes cover a plane, look at M.C. Escher’s tessellations, and meet the puzzle of the tiling pentagons. Then they create a never-seen-before tiling shape of their own.
THE STRANGE BIRDS OF FLANNERY O’CONNOR (Grades 2–6): Long before she was a famous writer, young Flannery made small handmade books, raised odd birds, and once taught a chicken to walk backward. Amy shows students how the delightful archives that preserved these childhood creations reveal something important: the work children do matters. Students will meet Flannery’s peacocks and chickens, talk about what it means to become a writer, and make little books of their own. Those books might just end up in an archive someday.
THE BOY WHO DREAMED OF INFINITY (Grades 2–6): Srinivasa Ramanujan filled notebooks with mathematical discoveries long before anyone recognized his genius. Amy shares his story, along with her own mathematician father’s discovery of his lost notebook. Students will explore infinity and partitions, and then turn to kolams, the South Indian tradition of patterns drawn around grids of dots. They will build kolam tilings in Polypad and with a hands-on puzzle (both of which Amy helped to create). This program shows math as art, discovery, and adventure that happens far beyond the textbook.
INFINITE SHAPES: MARJORIE RICE & RAMANUJAN (Grades 3–6): Two outsiders, a homemaker in San Diego and a clerk in Madras, made discoveries that changed mathematics forever. This combined program compares their paths as amateur mathematicians, connects pentagon tilings to kolam tilings, involves beautiful hands-on experiences working with and creating tiling shapes, and asks students what they might discover when they follow their own curiosity.
FLYING PAINTINGS: THE ZHOU BROTHERS (Grades K–5): Two brothers, one canvas. Amy introduces students to the Zhou Brothers, a Chinese artist duo who paint together as a single collaborative voice. They now run a major art center in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood. Students will talk about creative collaboration and about art that crosses cultures, and they will discover a world-class studio right in their own city. This program is a natural fit for Chicago schools and could pair with a family visit to the Zhou B Art Center. The Zhou Brothers are occasionally willing to partner for an all-school visit.