>Jen Robinson alerted me to the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award for YA fiction, new to ALAN/NCTE but not to me. Years ago, Walden offered this award to YALSA, which turned it down because of her insistence that the winning book demonstrate “a positive approach to life.” We (I was on the board then) didn’t want [...]
>Just one more musical moment
November 4, 2008 By Leave a Comment
> Gertrude Stein by Robert Indiana Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s opera The Mother of Us All is a wildly fantasized biography of Susan B. Anthony, who, wondering and worrying over whether her celebrity has obscured her cause, asks of her supporters (in her tremendously moving final aria), “Do you know because I tell you [...]
>Lost in the 60s
April 23, 2008 By 3 Comments
>and the 70s I’ve been, listening to Julie Andrews marvelously read her new autobiography Home: A Memoir of My Early Years (Hyperion) and reading Sheila Weller’s Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon–and the Journey of a Generation. Forget the “You’re So Vain” gossip–did you know “Car on a Hill” was about Jackson [...]
>Star of the Day
April 10, 2008 By 11 Comments
>Forget Celebrity Writers . . .
February 24, 2008 By 3 Comments
>. . . for Oscar Day, I present you with a celebrity reviewer, movie actress Saffron Burrows in the Guardian. Good job, too. My Oscar hopes: No Country for Old Men, Coen brothers, George Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, none of them*, Amy Ryan, Persepolis; don’t care about the rest but think the un-nominated Eastern Promises [...]
>When Jane got a train
February 2, 2008 By Leave a Comment
>When Frog and Toad Are More Than Friends
December 13, 2007 By 5 Comments
>Who needs old closet case Dumbledore when Claire has put together a first-class list of out-n-proud GLBTQ-and-sometimes-Y fiction? I’ve got an editorial in the upcoming Horn Book about the outing of Dumbledore, who in fact joins a long line of characters who coulda-woulda-shoulda be gay if the reader so inclines–like Shakespeare in Susan Cooper’s King [...]
>Developmentally Delighted
September 12, 2007 By 6 Comments
>This Newsweek story about the over-diagnosis of developmental problems in kids reminds me of a discussion in my children’s lit class in library school. We were all enthusiastically talking about Harriet the Spy until one student, an infiltrator from the psych. department, sputtered, “I can’t believe you all are recommending children read this book about [...]
>Lesbolicious is the word
August 24, 2007 By 4 Comments
