Publications about books for children and young adults
Rick Bowers’s previous book, Spies of Mississippi: The True Story of the Spy Network That Tried to Destroy the Civil Rights Movement was a finalist for the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults. The journalist and historian’s latest offering is another compellingly told and meticulously researched account of events surrounding the civil [...]
Roger Sutton: Your new book, Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans, weaves together historical facts—about slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation, real people like Rosa Parks and Dr. King—with the stories of the relatives of your fictional narrator. It must have been quite complicated to do. What was your entry point? Kadir Nelson: [...]
For a writer so notoriously prolific (closing in on three hundred titles, according to Wikipedia) Jane Yolen is notable for maintaining a high standard of writing across many genres, including poetry, picture book texts, and fiction of both the realistic and fantastic kinds. Her latest novel, Snow in Summer, is a fresh blend of historical [...]
In preparing for an interview this afternoon with Daniel Handler about his and Maira Kalman’s forthcoming (and terrific) book Why We Broke Up, I came across “Thirteen Observations Made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance.” I especially like observation no. 4: “People who say money doesn’t matter are like [...]
The first helium-filled creatures to bob through Manhattan on Thanksgiving morning were brought to being by master puppeteer Tony Sarg in the 1920s. Now master illustrator Melissa Sweet, a prolific artist and winner of a Caldecott Honor for A River of Words: The Story of William Carlos Williams by Jen Bryant, has created an effervescent [...]
An earlier picture book by Claire A. Nivola, Elisabeth, told about the true experience of her mother, Ruth, a Jewish child whose family fled Nazi Germany. In Orani: My Father’s Village, author-illustrator Nivola takes readers along on a remembrance of her childhood visits to the small Sardinian town where her father was born. 1. Tomie [...]
Author-illustrator Leo Landry, a twenty-year bookselling veteran of The Children’s Book Shop in Brookline, Massachusetts, is the creator of picture books (Space Boy; Eat Your Peas, Ivy Louise!), as well as chapter books (Fat Bat and Swoop; Sea Surprise); newly independent readers should line up for Grin and Bear It, his latest offering. In this [...]
Loosely based on a two-minute animation Sendak created with Jim Henson for Sesame Street in 1971, Bumble-Ardy revisits his long-standing preoccupations with childhood outsider-hood and saving-grace resilience, but with a new twist of extravagance taken straight from the operatic playbook of Giuseppe Verdi. We talked about all this at the artist’s kitchen table in a conversation recorded on May 12, 2011.
An experienced editor of books for young people (as well as the editor of A Family of Readers by Martha Parravano and me), Marc Aronson is also one of the genre’s most distinguished historians. His Sir Walter Ralegh and the Quest for El Dorado won both the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award and the inaugural Sibert [...]
Newbery, Printz & Caldecott