‘Kids are Just as Smart as Grown Ups’
Kathryn Hulick ’04 tackles big topics, including AI and fusion energy, in her books for young readers
Long before she understood what she was doing, Kathryn Hulick ’04 was writing for kids.
“I realized in my writing classes at Colby that I was not writing for the same audiences as my classmates. What I was working on was not even in the same realm as what other people were working on. They were dealing with these intense topics, and I was writing adventure stories,” she said. “Looking back, I can see that I was writing for kids already, but it took me a while to figure it out.”
Hulick followed her instincts and has built a career as a highly regarded author for young readers, who writes about big, timely topics in ways that are easy to understand for kids and adults alike. Her new science fiction book, The UFO Files: Notes on an Alien Encounter, will come out in August with the publisher Quarto. Told in a graphic novel style, it exists at the confluence of science fiction and nonfiction. Beyond the story about a UFO landing, the book includes sidebars that introduce readers to such ideas as rocket science, fusion energy, and using AI to decipher an unknown language.
Hulick, who grew up in New Hampshire and lives with her husband and 10-year-old son outside of Boston, published two previous books with Quarto, both nonfiction for kids, Welcome to the Future (2021) and Strange But True (2019).
She has developed her niche as an author who writes up to the intelligence of young people. The intense curiosity of middle-school-aged kids really appeals to her.
“Kids are just as smart as grown-ups. They just don’t have as much life experience,” she said. “I never dumb things down. I try to go right into the most complicated and interesting stuff, but I do it in a way that people with little or no background knowledge can grasp.”
In doing so, she also creates an opening for adults—kids’ parents, or others—to read and learn. “I wish it wasn’t taboo for adults to read kids’ books, because this is not just a kids’ book,” she said. “Though you can read the book as a fun adventure story, it also grapples with deeper themes, including cross-cultural understanding and rights for other species.”
Background as a journalist
Hulick comes to her big-tent approach to writing through her work as a journalist. She covers AI, technology, and science for the magazine Science News as well as for Science News Explores, a spinoff aimed at younger readers, and other publications. She recently wrote a piece about Assistant Professor of Philosophy Ben Baker and his use of AI for Colby News. She also writes for publishers of educational books and has developed curricula for a national provider of technology-based assessment and instructional programs for elementary and middle school students.
She first took an interest in artificial intelligence in high school and regularly covered the technology throughout her career. So she was well-positioned when ChatGPT and tools like it became popular. Her editors want stories on the topic—now. She sees AI as a powerful new technology with potential to both help and harm. Her job is to help people understand its potential and limits.
“I understand where the fear of AI is coming from, especially from creative people. But AI cannot do what I do, and it is not going to anytime soon. It is a pile of statistics. It is not a brain. It is not thinking the same way I do.”
‘I liked being in the woods’
A high school valedictorian, Hulick had options when choosing colleges. She chose Colby because of its academic program and its rural setting far from her home near Manchester, N.H. “I am not a city person,” she said. “I liked nature, honestly. I liked being in the woods. I used the trails around Colby all the time for cross-country skiing and walking.”
Hulick majored in studio art but took classes in a range of subjects, including creative writing and religious studies. She worked as a tutor at the Farnham Writers’ Center throughout her time on Mayflower Hill, an experience that she said “probably improved my writing more than my actual writing classes. I found my home there.”
She also developed her curiosity about science at Colby. Two of her most memorable courses were taught by Charles Conover, the William A. Rogers Professor of Physics. One was about the atomic bomb, another explored chaos theory. Neither involved hands-on lab work, but both pushed the boundaries of how Hulick thought about the world and her place in it.
“Those were my favorite courses,” she said. “I realized that I really like thinking about science. ”
Life after Colby
As graduation approached in spring 2004, Hulick considered applying for graduate school. Had she applied, she would have studied cognitive science or possibly computer science. “But I decided I did not want to do more school, and I did not want to just go get a job. I was looking for other options. I wanted to do things for myself and get real-life experience.”
She joined the Peace Corps and got the experience of her life in Kyrgyzstan, a mountainous country between Russia and China. For two years, she taught English in a small town on the border of Kazakhstan, became fluent in Kyrgyz, and learned a lot of Russian.
“It was an amazing experience that changed my life, for sure,” she said.
As part of her English-teaching regimen, she supplemented her lessons with donated children’s magazines. While flipping through these magazines, she realized these stories were exactly what she wanted to write.
After her two-plus-year commitment to the Peace Corps, she returned to the United States and got an internship at a children’s magazine group. She began building a career as a writer, journalist, and storyteller while pursuing her interests in science and technology.
The UFO Files is a book Hulick first imagined as a third-grader, when she wrote a story about a UFO landing at her school. In this new story set in 2033, recently declassified files detail the arrival of an alien spacecraft. Compiled by an investigator named Polaris, the files include information about every aspect of the spaceship, who built it, and how.
STEM-related topics that emerge in the investigator’s notebook include nuclear fusion and clean energy, exoplanets, stars and astronomy, the likelihood of alien life, how rockets fly, and AI. Each topic is supported with sidebars that explain the science and detailed illustrations and graphics by Weston Wei.
The UFO Files will be released Aug. 5. Hulick will hold a series of launch events in the Boston area, including a reading at her son’s school. To find out more, follow her Substack.
