It feels wild to think that we only have 7.5 weeks left in the school year. One of my favorite things about the school year is watching my readers and their preferences evolve over the course of our 180 days together. I’d love to know which books the readers you serve are loving these days. […]
April
11
A Story of Resilience and Sisterhood in Three Summers by Amra Sabic-El-Rayess PhD
posted by CBethM
As a genocide survivor, so much of my life has been defined by my survival of the unimaginable during the Bosnian Genocide, as told in The Cat I Never Named. While the physical scars of hate, including the Serb military’s bombing of my home on my birthday, starvation, and isolation of living under the siege […]
April
09
Black Girl Joy and the Science of Belonging as Explained by Second Graders by Carmen Bogan
posted by CBethM
When I first walk through the doors of a new elementary school, the atmosphere is palpable. The place is humming with laughter, chatter, a random teacher’s elevated voice. Somebody is racewalking to the bathroom or dragging to the school office. Learning. It smells like recess sweat. A burst of colorful crayon art depicting friends’ faces […]
April
04
Bless Our Pets Cover Reveal by Lita Judge
posted by CBethM
It was a honor to illustrate this collection of poems curated by Lee Bennet Hopkins. First, because I’ve been a great fan of his work for as long as I can remember. Long after I began reading his poems, I met him at an ALA conference and our conversation is a cherished memory. Second, because […]
April
02
Author Candy J. Cooper and Editor Susan Dobinick on Shackled: A Tale of Wronged Kids, Rogue Judges, and a Town that Looked Away
posted by CBethM
Written by award-winning journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Candy J. Cooper, SHACKLED: A Tale of Wronged Kids, Rogue Judges, and a Town that Looked Away (Calkins Creek/Astra Books for Young Readers, April 2, 2023) is the explosive story of the Kids for Cash scandal in Pennsylvania, a judicial justice miscarriage that sent more than 2,500 […]
April
01
The Little Challenge Sleeping Inside Me by Maria Mazas
posted by CBethM
FROM CHILDREN’S BOOK EDITOR TO AUTHOR I’d been working as a freelance editor for children’s book publishing houses … and dreaming about writing my own stories. At least, trying to write my own stories! I’d written different beginnings, but few endings. It’s easy to begin a story, much more difficult to finish! So, there was this little challenge sleeping […]
March
28
Thanks Jon, Mac and Ruth: Inspiration for THIS IS A WINDOW by Lauren Paige Conrad
posted by CBethM
For years, I had been ruminating on boundaries to give myself as an illustrator-aspiring author. There were too many open-ended possibilities, and from my perspective just too many other books already. I needed parameters, or maybe a mantra, that guided my book-making, and one that honored the picture book form. To me, that meant intentionally […]
March
25
Because Everyone Has a Story…by Kate Messner
posted by CBethM
There’s nothing quite like the first day of school. That excited-nervous, jittery-joyful anticipation of new classmates, and maybe new friends. Turns out, it’s the same feeling you get when you embark on a huge collaborative project with sixteen other authors whose work you’ve always loved and admired. And it’s also the feeling you get when […]
March
19
Where Butterfly Came From by Adam Pottle
posted by CBethM
Like many Deaf people, I grew up in a hearing family. Sign Language didn’t exist in our house, so I had to do things my family’s way, which meant wearing hearing aids and enduring speech therapy. Because I couldn’t hear myself speak, I’d sometimes mumble or mispronounce something and be chastised for it. My brother’s nickname for me was “freak.” I never believed there was a place for me in the world, because I […]
March
05
What If…What If…What If by Deborah Freedman
posted by CBethM
What is that worm doing, underfoot? That bird flying overhead? Where did the parts of my house come from? Could a character be too shy to appear in its own book? What if… what if… what if…* They usually begin with a question, the books I write, their ideas springing from wonder. Ideas are all […]
Nerdy Book Club 