So happy to be invited to be part of Nancy Castaldo’s blog series on researching STEM kidlit. Nancy is an award-winning author, photographer, and environmental educator and it is an honor to know her. From her website: Nancy Castaldo has written books about our planet for over 20 years. Her 2016 title THE STORY OF SEEDS:… Read more »
Author Andrea Bartz schools us on why it is important to pre-order books — and especially to pre-order from independent bookstores. This information appeared as a series of tweets on the Twitter. The individual tweets were threaded together by an app called Threader. Very cool, eh? After reading, please consider pre-ordering a book! ——————————————————————… Read more »
Have you heard about #KidsNeedMentors? It’s a grassroots program started by a group of passionate people (teachers and a children’s book author/illustrator) who want to move the needle on literacy through real connections between children’s book creators and students. I’d heard about the inaugural program last year and was bummed that I missed the window… Read more »
Author and empower-er Patricia Newman hosts a blog series called LitLinks for teachers and learners about how to connect English Language Arts (ELA) with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). She’s using children’s books as the connector. I was thrilled to receive an invitation to contribute to the series and talk about how to use STRETCH… Read more »
Recently I had the opportunity to be a special guest as part of the Picture Books and All That Jazz Workshop (PB & J) at the Highlights Foundation Retreat Center. You can see I was jazzed about being part of this workshop. And a Highlights experience has been on my bucket list for years, so…CHECK! Now, I’ve attended… Read more »
I’m pleased as punch to be a Special Guest for the fifth Picture Books and All That Jazz Workshop at Highlights. Every year, this Workshop receives high praise from attendees. The Workshop is run by award winning authors, Darcy Pattison and Leslie Helakoski (also an author/illustrator) who focus on helping writers bring their manuscripts to… Read more »
“Here lies one doubly blessed. She was happy and she knew it.” — Gwen Frostic’s epitaph written by herself The Surprise On March 9th, 2019, during the Michigan Reading Association‘s (MRA) annual literacy conference, I was honored with their 2019 Gwen Frostic Award. I hadn’t a speck of an inkling this was in the… Read more »
A quick look at the magazine rack at checkout counters reveals that January is the month to clean up and organize. I’m following suit inside my house but it dawned on me that I should peek into my digital home, too. Good thing I did because my online profiles looked like this…messy, cluttered, and disorganized. Cases… Read more »
No nonsense literary agent Linda Epstein offers up some thoughts about rejection. The format you see below is created through an app called Thread Reader in which all the tweets in a thread are stitched together so you can read them more easily — like a blog post. It’s pretty cool stuff. Read Linda’s thoughts… Read more »
Multi-published author, Lisa Amstutz, offers a helpful post for writers who are trying to traditionally publish their first book and experience long periods of time waiting for answers. [Let me interject that published authors wait, too. In fact, I double dare you to find a published author that doesn’t!] Remember Newton’s first law, “…a body in motion stays… Read more »
Sharing insights on writing children’s books and the publishing industry, and offering trinkets for creators and educators because you rock.
