Publications about books for children and young adults
Having grown up in the Free to Be generation, I’ve tried as a parent to steer clear of limiting gender norms in raising, and reading to, my son. We’ve read about boys and girls of all types, and (just as Hilary Rappaport describes in her May/June 2012 Horn Book article “On the Rights of Reading [...]
>Via Andrew Sullivan, an exhibition of photographs of children by Jeongmee Yoon displaying their obsessions with gendered colors. I see pink-bedecked and -accessorized little girls all the time but are there enough boys who feel similarly about blue to make the comparison meaningful? When I was a lad, the only rule was not-pink.
>On Saturday March 1st at 1:00PM, I’ll be at the Eric Carle Museum, moderating a panel discussion inspired by our earlier conversation about why women don’t win the Caldecott Medal as often as they might. The panelists for “Read Roger Live” will include illustrator Jane Dyer, children’s-books sexpert Robie Harris, Viking publisher Regina Hayes, and [...]
>The New York Times Ten Best Illustrated Books have been announced; as commenter Ruth notes on a previous post, the gender score is eight to two. Elsewhere in the Times‘s special section on children’s books I review Jaclyn Moriarty’s The Spell Book of Listen Taylor (Levine/Scholastic). I note with only fortuitous smugness that the last [...]
>I’m just writing up a notice for Artist to Artist: 23 Major Illustrators Talk to Children about Their Art (Philomel), which isn’t really for kids but is an extremely handsome exhibition-in-pages of some great illustrators, including for each a gorgeously reproduced self-portrait as well as photos of their workspaces and preliminary studies and sketches. With [...]
We have called this special issue “Boys and Girls” in tribute to where the Horn Book’s great adventure began, as the newsletter of Bertha Mahony’s Bookshop for Boys and Girls, est. 1916. But as someone who came of age with the second-wave feminism of the 1970s, I’m anxious that we not be seen as favoring [...]
>The inaugural Horn Book Podcast is up for your listening pleasure. Lolly is setting it up with iTunes so you’ll be able to subscribe; for now, go to the podcast page on our site to hear my interview with Jon Scieszka. I interviewed Jon for our special September issue, Boys and Girls. That too is [...]
