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From the May/June 2025 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Perception and Reality. Single copies of this special issue are available for $15.00 including postage and may be ordered from: Horn Book Magazine Customer Service hbmsubs@pcspublink.com Full subscription information is here. ...
Every fantasy novel I write is grounded in our world. That’s no secret. Elatsoe, Sheine Lende, and A Snake Falls to Earth all occur in an alternate version of Texas (in the present, the past, and the future, respectively). Their worlds are similar to ours; however, they also harbor impossibilities...
Every day, I dread picking up my phone in the morning and looking at my newsfeed. Doomscrolling, they call it. We don’t want to do it, and yet somehow, we feel compelled. Most of the time those headlines seem like something from some other reality, all strung together by pet...
Fantasy is a broad genre (and broader still if you stretch the category to include science fiction). It can range from stories set firmly in real life with just the barest hint of the uncanny to those that take place in entirely imagined worlds or universes. Personally, I have always...
Photo: Collin Griffiths. When I was a child, reality was a thing to escape from. I had an imaginary friend. I constructed elaborate soap opera plots featuring my Barbie dolls. I read books and wrote, and wrote, and wrote. In the worlds I created, bullies were humiliated and defeated. Handsome,...
Newsrooms are strange places at night. Silent, mossy hollows of noise. Muted and soft and then, deeper in, a knockout punch of sound. A cacophony of all the bad, everywhere in the world. Beneath the spaceship-white lights, you are alone. Or nearly alone. Most of the local reporters have long...
How does reality shape the sci-fi I create? My writer’s heart is always drawn to writing the bizarre and fantastical. I’d written a lot of short stories and was always worried my ideas would be too strange for a reader to suspend disbelief. When I decided to write my first...
“Let’s make a fantasy world,” I tell a classroom full of middle schoolers. I’ve been invited to teach a fantasy world-building class. “Name a person, place, or thing. Anything! Go.” “Frogs,” a kid blurts out. “Great!” I say. “You’ve just named what the people of this fantasy realm value most...
Special Issue: ALA Awards. Original cover art by 2025 Caldecott Medal winner Rebecca Lee Kunz. Carole Boston Weatherford’s Children's Literature Legacy Award acceptance speech. A profile of Carole Boston Weatherford by educator Dawnavyn James. Erin Entrada Kelly’s Newbery Medal acceptance speech. A profile of Erin Entrada Kelly by author Sharon...
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