Dear friends:

I need to pass along a curse. Last week I did a Talks with Roger interview with Nidhi Chanani about her new graphic novel Jukebox. And now this song is stuck in my head, but I figure if enough of you listen to it, it might leave me alone. (I was made again aware this morning of my belief in a conscious universe when Richard put in place a big ladder to fix the chirping smoke alarm only to have the chirping then stop, because clearly the threat had been enough.)

Over on the website, we’re continuing to feature articles from the May/June Special Issue. Check out Yuyi Morales’s picture-story about the time she got in trouble at school for drawing a picture of (naked) people k-i-s-s-i-n-g. (Remember the Trouble Special Issue? That was a fun one.) Along with a few other Lighting the Candle short pieces, this week we shared award statistics compiled by consulting editor Sujei Lugo and Alicia K. Long, plus an interview with Pura Belpré’s great-nieces by Anika Aldamuy Denise, author of Planting Stories: The Life of Librarian and Storyteller Pura Belpré, art from which is featured on our cover. More to come; keep an eye on hbook.com and on Twitter @hornbook and Facebook.com/TheHornBook).

In the September/October issue, we’re publishing an excerpt from a book I’m very excited about, Eugene Yelchin’s middle-grade memoir, The Genius Under the Table: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain, coming this fall from Candlewick. You can see Eugene talking about the book in this video interview with the curator of the Wende Museum, to which I must go. Relatedly, right now I’m reading Ben Macintyre’s Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy, about the German communist Ursula Kuczynski who spied for the Soviets during WWII. At this point (in my reading) she’s in China rubbing elbows with Agnes Smedley, who seems to have been quite the complicated character. Where’s the picture-book biography of her?

Love,

Roger