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Retract those claws

warrior

and go meet “Erin Hunter” of Warriors fame at the Cambridge Public Library on Tuesday, March 5th at 6:00 PM. When I asked which Erin Hunter,  I was told it would be top cat Victoria Holmes, who from this description sounds like the Francine Pascal of the Warriors world.

Building a better board book

babyreadingjpg

We’re trying something new this spring. With Reach Out and Read and the Cambridge Public Library, the Horn Book is presenting a one-day conference about books and the youngest readers/listeners/lookers. We thought it would be useful to cross-fertilize our areas of expertise (Reach Out and Read on brain development, CPL on using books with children, [...]

How to publish for the CCSS

Ha ha, not really. I hope everybody is getting some use out of our latest newsletter, Nonfiction Notes from the Horn Book. I’ve been thinking about NF a lot since ALA, where I spent two solid days talking to publishers about what they were planning for the coming year(s). Along with inflicting upon the world [...]

Another Gone Girl

Barbara_Newhall_Follet,jpg

This weekend I happened upon Paul Collins’ essay “Vanishing Act,” about the writing prodigy Barbara Newhall Follett, whose The House Without Windows was published by Knopf in 1927 when the author was twelve.  Our own Bertha Mahony loved the book, devoting three pages to it in the February 1927 Magazine. While Follett would go on to publish [...]

Horn Book Magazine March/April starred reviews

The following books will receive starred reviews in the March/April issue of the Horn Book Magazine. Incidentally, this is also our annual special issue; the theme this year is “Different Drummers” with a ground-breaking (for us, anyway) cover by Paul Zelinsky (whose absence from the recent Caldecott announcement marks a Dark Day in that award’s [...]

Time to vote

vote

Lolly and Robin have posted the first ballot for Calling Caldecott’s mock award, so go vote. My first choice has remained consistent for months but I had some fun choosing my runners-up. (Wouldn’t it be great if we lost the “Caldecott Honor” euphemism? And wouldn’t it be even greater if we RANKED the recipients?)

The 2013 Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction

chickadee

The 2013 Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction goes to Louise Erdrich for Chickadee, published by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. The annual award, created by Scott O’Dell and Zena Sutherland in 1982 and now administered by Elizabeth Hall, carries with it a prize of $5000, and goes to the author of a distinguished [...]

Counting Down Caldecott

As K.T. Horning embarks on her decade-by-decade Caldecott Medal retrospective (Mei Li in January; Prayer for a Child coming up in March) in the Horn Book Magazine, I’m reminded of Leonard Marcus’s own Caldecott Celebration, a book for kids (but you’ll like it too) in which he similarly looked at one winner from each decade, [...]

Will this be on the test?

Hand

I’d like to have been at this NYPL panel on nonfiction put together by Betsy Bird. The four panelists are among the best of our nonfiction writers, and I would have loved to ask them how their  job prospects were looking under the Common Core State Standards. With the CCSS (have we agreed this is [...]

OUR Liza with a Z

TenSled

PW‘s Elizabeth Bluemle (who, by the way, has a wonderful article coming up in the March/April Horn Book Magazine) visits our own Liza Woodruff, who unaccountably  left work as a circulation assistant at the Horn Book to live in Vermont with her lovely husband and children and dogs while she pursues a full-time career as [...]