In June of this year, precisely three years after two prisoners broke out of Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York, Kate Messner and Beth Kephart published middle-grade novels inspired by the incident—BREAKOUT (Bloomsbury) and WILD BLUES (Atheneum), respectively. Kate’s book takes the form of a time capsule—a collection of letters, images, notes, and reports […]
Tag Archives: @KateMessner
July
20
Kate Messner and Beth Kephart on the real-life prison break that fueled their new middle grade stories
posted by CBethM
June
06
A Life Story in Books by Kate Messner
posted by CBethM
Readers always tell their life stories in books. When I think back to my childhood, I remember friends and family, splashing in the pool and turning over rocks to look for crayfish in the creek behind our house. But for every year, every age, there’s also a book. I remember meeting Beverly Cleary’s […]
August
02
Still a Work in Progress: Learning, Loving, and Laughing through Stories about Life’s Tough Times by Jo Knowles and Kate Messner
posted by CBethM
When I ran into Donalyn Miller at an SCBWI conference and she asked if I’d be interested in writing a post for the Nerdy Blog. It was right around this time that Kate Messner and I had read each other’s books and had an interesting e-mail exchange about how similar many of the themes were. […]
January
27
How a Bad Case of the What-Ifs Turned into a Book by Kate Messner
posted by CBethM
I need to start this blog post with a bit of a confession. I am a what-iffer. If you are one, too, you already know exactly what I mean, but for those who don’t, here’s an explanation. What-iffers are world-class worriers. You probably know one or two. Fail to answer your phone […]
December
02
When Characters Stick Around… by Kate Messner
posted by CBethM
Readers are never really lonely because we have so many friends living in our heads. If you’re here at the Nerdy Book Club, you already understand how this works. We have a lifetime of characters inhabiting our imaginations, telling stories while we do the dishes or drive a long, boring highway. For me, those […]
The Center of Everything by Linda Urban – A Not-Quite-a-Review by Kate Messner
posted by CBethM
When Colby invited me to review Linda Urban’s The Center of Everything for the Nerdy Book Club, I jumped at the opportunity. But then I got thinking…I’m not really going to review this book. I’m simply going to recommend that you read it and share it far and wide because it is that kind of […]
Teachers Write!
posted by CBethM
Hi! My name is Jen, I’m a teacher, and I want to publish a book. Here at Nerdy Book Club we rave and gush over our favorite books, our reading memories, our dreams for how readers can achieve world domination…but have you ever thought about writing a book yourself? Can you imagine what it might […]
The Magic of Serendipitous Reading
posted by CBethM
My heart sank when I saw the recent news that Britannica was discontinuing the print version of its encyclopedias. I understand the reasons behind the decision. I do. But I also feel like we’re losing something in saying goodbye to those clunky old volumes. When I was a kid (Warning: I am about to expose […]
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