Features & Opinion
Welcome to our celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Pura Belpré Award, founded in 1996 by REFORMA and the American Library Association to honor Latino and Latina creators of children’s and young adult literature whose work “best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience.” But before I pass...
It is National Poetry Month, and the books selected by our editors for this issue of Notes remind me of how pliable our definition of poetry has had to become: it can be poetry-poetry, as in the collections by Naomi Shihab Nye, Jack Prelutsky, and Nikki Grimes reviewed above; but...
Welcome to Women’s History Month, which we are celebrating at the Horn Book through March. Really, given the influence Bertha Mahony Miller and her Horn Book sistren still hold upon this company, it’s always Women’s History Month for us, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. I may joke...
March is Women’s History Month, and although we didn’t plan it this way, it turns out that our book review section has a mind of its own, including no fewer than thirteen new nonfiction titles devoted to the achievements of a diverse gallery of women, heroes every one. Historically, they...
Welcome to Black History Month 2021! As several of the books reviewed here remind us, you can’t have American history without it. Please go see all of our BHM coverage on the website, where the indefatigable Cindy and Elissa are posting related reviews, interviews, articles, and essays every day throughout...
Though we won’t miss 2020 (good riddance), we will miss the world that Megan Whalen Turner created in her Queen’s Thief series, complete with political maneuvering, backstabbing, power grabs...oh, wait. World-building was perfected by Turner, and is used to great effect in these recent YA titles. If kindhearted skunks and...
I can’t tell you how happy I am to write a January/February editorial where I don’t have to make a snide remark about the new president’s disdain for reading. Joe Biden reads poetry. Out loud, even. Goodness knows that an appreciation of books is not a guarantee of good character,...
Ready to celebrate? I bet you are, and our annual Holiday High Notes list of recommended seasonal titles is here to help you get the party started. It’s not too early, he says, having picked up two boxes of chocolate peppermint cookies earlier today, and while to keep household peace...
The problem with the November/December issue is that it comes out a little too early. Looking back at the 2016 editorial co-written by Martha Parravano and me: “At the time of this writing, we don’t yet know the outcome of the presidential election. (Anyone with a time-travel device, please let...
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