One year ago, we were putting the finishing touches on our special issue highlighting “Our Centennial” during a yearlong celebration of The Horn Book Magazine’s hundredth anniversary. If you haven’t seen it recently (or at all), please check it out; commemorative copies are still available for purchase, and you’ll find links to the content at hbook.com/page/horn-book-centennial. Though some details were elusive — is it really founder Bertha Mahony Miller’s chair? — the aim was fairly concrete: to explore the state of contemporary children’s literature by delving into the past while looking ahead.

It’s just one year later, and the future is now. Times are different in innumerable ways and at a dizzying pace. The theme of this year’s special issue — Perception and Reality — centers on what is considered real and by whom and spotlights artists’ creativity and reaction to unprecedented times. For example, what’s your perception of this issue’s cover by the award-winning and multitalented Edel Rodriguez? “Mysterious,” “unsettling,” “calm,” “terrifying,” and “favorite” are some of the things we’ve heard. I find it hard to look away — and then frequently notice something new upon re-viewing.

The titles in Cathryn M. Mercier’s article about metafiction in picture books on page 10 command similarly brain-bending, second-looking attention. Mercier directs the graduate degree programs in children’s literature at Simmons University, where I first encountered metafictive classics such as Black and White and The Stinky Cheese Man and was able to spend time in that (grad-school jargon alert!) liminal space “Between Fiction and Reality.” Fellow Simmons alum Karen Boss, now an editor at Charlesbridge, provides a self-aware assessment of her academic and commercial perspectives and the children’s book industry’s contemporary rewards and challenges (AI, sales, longevity, bans, gatekeepers) in “A Two-Brained Intersection” on page 14. “Whenever I mention the creativity/commerce intersection to creators, I do it as a way to encourage them to keep writing, to keep making art, to keep on keeping on in the journey of making books for kids,” she says.

The Horn Book is lucky to have the voices of so many such dedicated and talented creators in this special issue. Deborah Hopkinson presents “Evidence!” of the thought processes involved in crafting a nonfiction picture book and a middle-grade novel from similar source material on page 39. On page 43, the Horn Book’s own Shoshana Flax, with illustrator Grant Snider, provides poetic “Real Talk” about the vitality of books and reading, of libraries, and of the reinforced validation of understanding “you’re real.”

For our short-piece series beginning on page 17, we asked fourteen authors known for sci-fi/fantasy: “How does reality shape the fantasy or speculative work you create?” Here’s a sneak peek: “A dash of reality doesn’t simply make fantasy more believable; it also makes the real world more fantastic,” says Philip Reeve. Tracey Baptiste writes, “reality, fantasy, and speculative fiction are inextricably tied. No matter how imaginative a creator is, they can only reflect the world they live in, and that is what our stories become: reflection, response, and in works for children — relief.” “Reality isn’t always great. In fact, reality truly does suck sometimes…But reality is also a necessity for the creation of fantasy,” states Shaun David Hutchinson. As Jordan Ifueko astutely observes, “to many, the point of fantasy is escape. But…the comfort one derives from any fantasy is deeply political. Because when a story about power comforts us, it reveals what we wish were true of the real world.”

Neal Shusterman (who has been asked by readers to “predict something happy for once”) notes: “The only reason speculative fiction can sound prophetic is because the lens of the surreal can be so much clearer than a window.” Book creators are not soothsayers, but they are careful observers. And often they are truth-tellers whose perceptions can help shape and reflect better worlds, “to write them into reality,” as Kamilah Cole says — to the satisfaction and appreciation of readers who experience storytelling as resistance.

From the May/June 2025 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Perception and Reality.

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