Articles & Opinion
Children are highly attuned to human emotions, curiously observant, and intuitively responsive to their environments. They begin to form ideas of fairness in early childhood. While they don’t yet understand all the complexities of the world, children are more aware than adults realize and could actually benefit from learning the...
I started writing books for very young children in anger. A strange admission, I know. I was receiving a wobbly stack of board books to review for Kirkus each month, and I often vented about how developmentally inappropriate many were. I got holiday titles that read like extra-thick greeting cards...
“Where do you get your ideas?” I’ve been asked this question by children countless times during author visits, but I still love answering it. “The same place you do,” I respond. “Where do your ideas come from?” Students and I share inspirations: pets, dreams, things we experience, unexpected ideas that...
There’s a brief mention of the pandemic in Throwback, my latest YA novel, about a Korean American girl who travels back to 1995 and meets her mother as a teen. It’s handled with an almost perceptively self-conscious breeziness — making a joke out of my protagonist’s anxiety spiral as she...
It all started when I was a baby. For my 돌 Dol, a traditional Korean first birthday ceremony, I sat in front of several objects. I grabbed a pen, which meant I would become a writer. That prediction came true. I started off as a newspaper and magazine reporter. Now...
"In 2018, the Horn Book published Kekla's article 'The Un-Hero's Journey,' which celebrated the quietly heroic moments that are possible even when we feel our most ordinary. That message is more relevant now than ever, in a time when librarians are fighting to keep books on the shelves, teachers are...
How did I end up in the picture-book world? It was all because of Nicole Rubel, the brilliant illustrator of the Rotten Ralph books, among many others. I was a creative writing student at Emerson College, and I was still on parole after an unsuccessful attempt to smuggle a ton...
A picture book is a dance that begins with a solitary dancer, whose success depends on sharing the stage with future partners. In truth, it is a company of dancers: author and illustrator, editor, designer, and art director. And only together will the dance flourish. But as Patrick Swayze famously...
Early on the morning of August 1, 2022, I joined a group of hikers at the gates of what was once the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, and we set off on a six-day, 140-kilometer trek across southern Poland. Within a couple of hours, it became clear that I was in for...
28 articles
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