From Amy Alesio and Kim Paton When I told you all about Google Lit Trips one of you wrote that you were pleased to get concrete information you could use — and that stuck with me, because my own personal bent (as you all know) is to the big picture and the big ideas. Well [...]

YALSA Now Has Its Own Select Group of Best Nonfiction Books — and here it is: tinyurl.com/yf5fcd5 Out of this group of five, one will be selected as the medalist the other four are, thus, honor books. This does not mean Printz = Fiction. NF is just as eligible for the Printz as it ever was [...]

I’ve Been Reading the "Heavy Medal" Blog  and Jonathan has a link that we all should follow. He takes readers to Peter Sieruta’s blog tinyurl.com/yzdj9fn (which is called Collecting Children’s Books, but is really as much about reading and thinking about those books), where Peter says, "There was once a time when nonfiction and biographies for [...]

Led Me to Think About Teenage and Immigration We had three book readings this weekend at our local store — which, I might add, is one of the few independent bookstores that opened right in the midst of the recession: Words www.wordsmaplewood.com/ all around the theme of immigration. Most interesting for readers of this blog, I [...]

In My Other Life as An Editor, I’ve Been Having fun Making Up Anthologies The anthology form is interesting. In one way it is the most bland and invisible structure — the editor picks a theme or topic, finds authors suited to that work, and hopes he gets  both a spread of good individual entries and [...]

Using Blackboard Posts to Reach Beyond the Book This week, courtesy of an online YA lit class, Patty Campbell and I have been meeting with librarians to talk about War Is, the anthology we co-edited. By coincidence, today I met with teachers of 6th, 7th, and 8th graders who will be working with me, again [...]