Last night Marina and I had the treat of attending a “political salon” hosted by the World Policy Institute. This was a get-together with nibbles and wine, but structured around a discussion. Dr. Mira Kamdar — author of Planet India, she is American but lives in Paris and studies India — focused the discussion on [...]

Saturday morning I happened to notice that NASA was about to launch the Atlas-Centaur rocket holding the rover named Curiosity to Mars. I told my boys, we turned on the TV and caught the countdown and liftoff. Over the weekend we had watched a documentary on the Mercury 7, but this was the first time [...]

In response to the last blog, Pamela Turner suggested that calling our books “True” poses a problem since some are more “truthi” than “true.” I also prefer “reality” to “truth” but almost for the opposite reason. I don’t think the calling card of our books is, or indeed should be, that we present gilt-edged, certified, [...]

In my school visits I have taken to suggesting a contest to rename NF by what it is, not what it is not. Here are the most truthful (not all positive) but at times spectacular responses from a recent day spent with 7th Graders in North Carolina: Renaming Nonfiction I would rename nonfiction “ice cream” [...]

I was fortunate enough to be part of the Orbis Pictus honorees panel, as If Stones Could Speak was one of winners. There were various slip ups — the room had changed and no one told me, time management was a challenge with one winner, Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring by Jan Greenberg and [...]

The Palmer House hotel I am using in Chicago is most ungenerous with WiFi but if you sit at the bar in the lobby and nurse a drink, you have free access. I was catching up on my student’s work yesterday when I saw, sitting next to me, a woman preparing her NCTE talk — [...]

The e-world buzzes all around us these days, and yet in the land of writing, publishing, and sharing books with young readers, print continues to flourish. But there is an area of tension that we all — and I especially mean those of you who are officers in ALA, who sit on award committees, and [...]

Last night we saw J. Edgar, the new Clint Eastwood, Leonardo DiCaprio biopic about Hoover, and as many of you know, my own YA book on the life and times of Hoover is coming out next year. Seeing the movie was a case study in the very question we had been discussing in my Rutgers [...]

This semester I have been teaching a course in the MLIS program at Rutgers on digital books and apps for K-12 libraries. “Teaching” is not really the right word, more like being ring-master, talk show host. Because each week we are visited by a creator, publisher, reviewer, distributor, or librarian already working in the field [...]

My meeting with the NYC school librarians took place in an immense hall — apparently the second largest in New York after Radio City Music Hall — and while the upper, and upper upper tiers were not filled (I could just picture some event with a famous guest and the kid who just managed to [...]