Goddard Riverside and the Children’s Book Council awarded Pura’s Cuentos their Youth Book Prize for Social Justice. I got to go to New York City to chat about the book and to share it with lots of kids (first time in-person after two years of school visits!). To celebrate, I’m giving away a copy of […]
I have teamed up with Tracy Newman, the author of Itzhak: A Boy Who Loved the Violin, the other Schneider Family Book Honor for Younger Readers, to give away our books, as well as the Award winner, I Talk Like a River, by Jordan Scott. To enter the drawing for one of the books, subscribe […]
All the Way to the Top is a Schneider Family Book Award Honor Book! I got the news via Zoom late Thursday night. It’s hard to keep a secret that long. The award honors books that emody the disability experience for children and youth. Lots of us worked on the book–Jennifer Keelan-Chaffins, Nabi Ali, and […]
Children’s magazines accepting submissions
Pacing can be tricky in nonfiction picture books. Authors are trying to wrestle all the messiness of real life into a single, coherent narrative. In The Elephant’s New Shoe, Laurel Neme gets the pacing just right. This true story tells how an animal rescue organization helped a disabled elephant, Chhouk, get a prosthetic leg. We […]
Concept books–counting, ABC, color–are the evergreens of the nonfiction world. They have an important place in children’s lives, but usually my reading of them isn’t marked by much surprise. A Gift for Amma by Meera Sriram charmed and delighted me by all the extras it brought to the reader. A Gift for Amma is, at […]
Teresa Robeson’s picture book biography, Queen of Physics: How Wu Chien Shiung Helped Unlock the Secrets of the Atom may seem to be a book about a physicisit. And it is! But it is also a book about a girl born into a society that devalued girls. A book about a democrat born into a […]
Those of us who have new books this Spring had lots of book promotion plans. But now we find ourselves instead sharing new books, Covid-19 style. For me and writer Laurie Wallmark, that means teaming up with Austin, Texas’ Writing Barn to do a virtual book tour. Laurie and I will each talk about our […]
Laura Wheeler Waring was a 20th century African American portrait artist who specialized in portraits of African Americans. She celebrated a generation of artists and thinkers. Her paintings hang in the National Portrait Gallery. And now the picture book biography Beautiful Shades of Brown celebrates her. In the book, author Nancy Churnin describes Waring’s interest […]
It’s women’s history month and we would be heading into the baseball season if this were a normal year. Mamie on the Mound: A woman in Baseball’s Negro Leagues by Leah Henderson is just the right book. It tells the story of the first female pitcher in professional baseball. Mamie Johnson learned the game as […]
I and my writer friends want to help parents struggling to teach at home and teachers struggling to teach remotely. We have started a YouTube channel called Tiny Writing Lessons where working writers give a short (3 minutes or less) lesson on a writing technique they use. Enjoy!
One of the problems writers face in celebrating advances in social justice is acknowledging that those advances didn’t solve everything. Equality’s Call: The Story of Voting Rights in America tackles the problem head-on. With a rhythmic rhyming text that invites reading aloud, Deborah Diesen lays out the gap between the ideals in America’s founding and […]
I loved this lively book about a girl, supported by her family, who found a way to be active in a society that discouraged it. The story tells the inspiring true story of how a Pakistani family supported their daughter in masquerading as a boy so that she could have an active childhood. Eventually, she […]
The cover is in for my new book, All the Way to the Top: How One Girl’s Fight for Americans with Disabilities Changed Everything, has arrived! It tells the true story of how an eight-year-old girl lobbied for the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 when it was stalled in Congress. What did Jennifer do? […]
Sarah Aronson’s wonderful biography Just Like Rube Goldberg opens by engaging the reader with an intriguing question. “Question: How do you become a successful, award-winning artist and famous inventor without ever inventing anything at all? (This is not a trick question.” Often in picture book biographies, the narrative voice intentionally recedes behind the story. But […]
Born to Ride: A Story about Bicycle Face is a fictionalized story. It tells how a turn-of-the-century girl shakes off expectations and takes off on a bicycle. The story is charming. I loved all the references to women’s suffrage in the illustrations. But my very favorite part of the book is the back matter. The back matter explains how the term […]
Stars come in all varieties. Elvis is King tells the childhood and youth of Elvis Presley via short poems. The focus on the artistic roots of Elvis’ music was effective–and at times heart-wrenching. But the most wonderful part of the book, in my opinion, is the quirky art. I loved Red Nose Studio’s art in The Secret Subway and […]
How-to nonfiction is a special category. I don’t think about it a lot, but when I go to the library, I often see kids trolling the shelves for books that will let them make or do something. So I was interested when an agency-mate asked if I wanted to profile her how-to book, Forest Fairy Crafts Through the Seasons. Since […]
Women in the past were understood primarily in terms of the roles they played in families. Two new nonfiction picture books embrace the importance of family relationships but show women as both family members and successes. Secret Engineer tells the story of how, in the nineteenth century, Emily Roebling kept her husband’s severe disabilities secret so […]
Several new nonfiction picture books tell the stories of women making art. Brave Ballerina is a biography of African American ballerina Janet Collins. It uses a predictive rhyming form: This is the girl who danced in the breeze to the swoosh, swoosh, swoosh of towering trees. The language was playful and inventive, and the rhythm fun to read […]
In today’s nonfiction picture books, rich back matter abounds! I love the way back matter extends the experience of reading a book. Often author essays explore issues of research as well as showing their personal connection to subject matter. Rich back matter also opens up books to different kinds of audiences–kids who are passionate about […]
It’s easy to find nonfiction picture books about animals. It’s trickier to find ones that tackle a broader range of science concepts. I loved the way both Just Right and Snowman-Cold=Puddle examined more abstract concepts.\ Just Right is an exploration of what we know about planets around other stars and how astronomers search for them. It’s loaded […]
The Boy Who Grew a Forest is a lyrical picture book biography of Jadav Payeng. As a boy, Payeng witnessed erosion and forest loss. His response was to quietly begin planting trees in a sandbar in a river. As the back matter explains, “In 2008, almost thirty years after he planted his first seedlings, Jadav’s forest was discovered by local […]
Recently I was trying to come up with a list of mentor texts for a writer who is working on a middle grade biography project. While these days publishers occasionally bring out traditional birth-to-death biographies for middle schoolers (this year’s Sibert medalist, The Girl Who Drew Butterflies, or last year’s beautiful Rosa’s Animals, or the astonishing Some Writer, for example), much […]
As a writer, I feel a shiver of dread when I find out someone else is publishing a book on the same topic as mine. But for young readers, having two books on the same topic can open up great learning opportunities. It gives them a chance to compare and contrast theme, word choice, authorial […]
I’ve been working through my stash of 2018 nonfiction books and discovered I had a set of animal books. So many great titles! Bugs Don’t Hug: Six-Legged Parents and Their Kids by Heather Montgomery, illustrated by Stephen Stone (Charlesbridge: 2018). This book about parenting practices of insects has fantastic page turns! On one page we see what human parents do, and on […]
Halloween to me means dressing up. It’s all about choosing the exact right outfit. Polka Dot Parade is a picture book biography that celebrates that urge to dress up, but in everyday life, not just the exceptional holiday. Polka Dot Parade tells the story of Bill Cunningham, a ground-breaking fashion photographer who pioneered the use of candid […]
Every year Washington, Missouri holds a 5K race called “Run to Read!” The newspaper, the Y, the library, and the local independent bookstore combine forces to gather community around the wonder of books. This year they decided to donate a portion of every entry to the Bobbi Gibb Marathon Sculpture Project, and they invited me […]
On Our Street: Our First Talk about Poverty opens by acknowledging that different people live in different ways. Then it invites children to inquire about those differences: “It’s okay to ask questions when you do not understand the way another person is living.” Each of the following spreads has a question a child might ask about […]
I love narrative nonfiction–those picture book biographies and other accounts that vividly recount important events. My own books so far have been narrative nonfiction. And I know there is a nice subset of kids who love stories like that. But Melissa Stewart has been on a mission recently to remind us that there are other […]