Cover Reveal: The Secret of the Dragon Gems by Rajani LaRocca & Chris Baron

March 30

Hi Nerdy Book Club friends! It’s Rajani LaRocca and Chris Baron here with the cover reveal of THE SECRET OF THE DRAGON GEMS, our middle grade novel coming on August 29! Here’s what it’s about: Eleven-year-olds Tripti Kapoor, a feisty “word nerd” from Massachusetts, and Sam Cohen, a shy, imaginative, budding geologist from California, are […]

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Re-Learning Our Lives as Readers by Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner

March 29

Nobody starts out reading like a specialized academic researcher; that is something a person learns over time. One of the consequences to that kind of training is–very often–a narrowed-in focus, which you need and is a valuable skill when building particular kinds of arguments for particular kinds of readers. But that narrowing-in can also be […]

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HATCHING AN IDEA by David Obuchowski

March 28

A topic I write about quite a bit is cars. I don’t write car reviews, I don’t write about how to fix them, I don’t write about them as machines. I write about people’s experiences with them. I am frequently asked why I write about this topic. My answer is that everyone has a car […]

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Taking Stories on the Road by Tara Dairman

March 17

Many writers get their first wisp of inspiration from a character who pops into their head, or a plot idea that won’t let them go. But I love starting with setting. Other than writing, travel is my great passion, and I’ve been lucky to visit more than 90 countries. This gives me a huge library of real-life places to draw from when […]

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On Visual Learners by Aaron Becker

March 15

It’s perhaps a testament to just how incredibly disruptive the pandemic has been to our sense of time that when I was told I’d written a post for the Nerdy Book club, I actually had no memory of ever doing so. A quick search pulled it up (August 2016) and what a joy it was […]

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A Dozen New Picture Book Biographies to Celebrate Women’s History Month by Sarah Green and Kate Hannigan

March 14

Stories of courage in the face of adversity are alway irresistible. As humans, we need to hear about happy endings—that someone just like us can face down a dragon and ultimately come out victorious. What’s easy to love about nonfiction is discovering a good beat-the-odds story and being able to say, “This actually happened!” Women’s […]

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Learning to Understand Comics by Matt Tavares

March 13

When people ask what kind of reader I was as a kid, it’s hard to give just one answer. From the time I was very young, my mom read to me and my sisters every night, and our family made countless trips to the public library. There are picture books from my childhood that when […]

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Ten Books That Inspire Kids (and adults!) to Play with Words by Kimberly Behre Kenna

March 10

I love wordplay. And it comes in so many packages! I’m not talking about Scrabble or Wordle, which I enjoy, but books that engage us with their snappy dialogue or their spare poetry. Books with text that inspires kids to think deeply, and may persuade them to want to write something themselves. Take picture books, […]

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Birds to Live By by Rebekah Lowell

March 08

One of my earliest memories is hearing the nocturnal cry of the Whip-poor-will outside my bedroom window and being afraid. But once my father explained that it was a bird, I was intrigued and mystified, all fear vanished. My love of birds started to form. After reading IF I WERE A BIRD by Gladys Conklin […]

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HER WHOLE LIFE IN A BOOK FOR CHILDREN – WHY? WRITING A TULIP IN WINTER: A STORY ABOUT FOLK ARTIST MAUD LEWIS BY KATHY STINSON

March 07

A picture book biography often focuses on its subject’s childhood but A Tulip in Winter spans Maud’s whole life (1903-1970). When Maud was young, she loved playing piano. But before long, a condition she was born with, later known to be rheumatoid arthritis, worsened. Her hands grew too bent and her fingers too stiff to continue. Her […]

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