Dear friends:

ALA is upon us! At least in HB land — I was just looking at layouts of The Speeches, gorgeous, and great speeches as well. That’s all you’ll get out of me. In her tenure as HB editor, Anita Silvey limited herself to saying “they aren’t too long,” and I follow in her wise path. (Still, the most useful quote Anita left me was her response to writers miffedly declaring that they had never been reviewed in the Horn Book. “Not yet,” she would agree with a smile.) “At” ALA, I’m going to be interviewing Mitali Perkins about her new book Steeped in Stories: Timeless Children's Novels to Refresh Our Tired Souls, which we excerpted in the March/April issue. The working title for our dialogue is “Why Read Books by Dead White Authors?” and I will let you know the details for attending (via Zoom) once I know them.

Our ALA Awards celebration proper will commence late next month; until then we continue to celebrate the Pura Belpré Award’s twenty-fifth anniversary with our May/June Special Issue. This week we posted author David Bowles’s article “Un Poquito Complicated: Spanish and the Pura Belpré Award” and Nick Brown’s Field Notes about his library system’s far-reaching virtual bilingual programming. I’m also particularly taken with some of the original illustrations created for this issue, including new pieces by Jenny Torres Sanchez, Raúl Colón, and Duncan Tonatiuh that we shared this week.

And we continue to urge you to get cracking with your summer reading, especially now that we’ve added a handy PDF version of our annual list. With a larger-than-usual baker’s dozen in each category to choose from, you’ll want to head over to your local library or bookstore ASAP to get started with these great reading options.

We were sad to lose two masters of the picture book this week. Please see our links to information about Lois Ehlert and Eric Carle.... Their books are canonical in literature for young children, and they will be missed.

Watching The Bureau has put me in a Henning Mankell mood again — grisly doings punctuated with existential contemplation and the realization that nothing bad ever really ends. Comment dit-on “C’est la vie” en suédois?*

Love,

Roger

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