“You don’t know what you don’t know.” This was a phrase one of my previous coworkers liked to use frequently, but I never truly appreciated her words until the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything. Suddenly, toilet paper went from being a banal commodity to a coveted luxury as the stuff became...
The Welcome Chair by Rosemary Wells; illus. by Jerry Pinkney Primary, Intermediate Wiseman/Simon 40 pp. g 11/21 978-1-5344-2977-2 $17.99 e-book ed. 978-1-5344-2978-9 $10.99 Two renowned picture-book creators trace the journey of a wooden rocking chair in this affecting immigration story based in part on Wells’s family lore. Wells begins with...
Dear friends: Today is my sixty-fifth birthday, and my present to myself (and maybe some of you!) is my retirement from the role of Editor in Chief of the Horn Book, Inc., effective December 31 of this year. Why? Because I’ve been at it for more than twenty-five years and...
The late Jerry Pinkney was a Caldecott giant, winning five Caldecott honors before striking gold with his historic 2010 win for The Lion and the Mouse. Let's take a moment — here on this blog that's all about the Caldecott — to appreciate his impact on the award as we remember a great...
Everybody here at the Horn Book is deeply saddened by the death of Jerry Pinkney, a great Friend of the Horn Book for many decades. I had just talked to Jerry, along with Rosemary Wells, for a Talks With Roger interview about their new picture book The Welcome Chair, which...
We here at Calling Caldecott are tremendously sad to learn about the death yesterday of author-illustrator Jerry Pinkney at the age of 81. As noted in the NPR obituary, released last night, Pinkney illustrated over one hundred books in his magnificent career, which began in 1964 with the publication of...
Talks with Roger is a sponsored supplement to our free monthly e-newsletter, Notes from the Horn Book. To receive Notes, sign up here. Sponsored by Once upon a time, Rosemary Wells’s great-great-grandfather made a rocking chair, now long lost and in need of a story. With Jerry Pinkney (and I can’t believe these two...
A Place to Land: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Speech That Inspired a Nation is an exemplary nonfiction picture book — as in, it represents the best of its kind. The story it tells — of the crafting of MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech at the 1963 March on Washington — is absolutely riveting; and the visual...
A Place to Land: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Speech That Inspired a Nation by Barry Wittenstein; illus. by Jerry Pinkney Primary, Intermediate Porter/Holiday 48 pp. g 8/19 978-0-8234-4331-4 $18.99 e-book ed. 978-0-8234-4374-1 $11.99 This superbly executed picture book takes readers behind the scenes of the writing of Dr....
This interview originally appeared in the May/June 2019 Horn Book Magazine as part of the Publishers’ Previews: Diverse Voices Redux, an advertising supplement that allows participating publishers a chance to each highlight a book from its current list. They choose the books; we ask the questions.Sponsored byHow do you depict...