BWIBooks has an interview with Gail Gibbons, author of amazing nonfiction picture books for children on a wide, wide variety of subjects. The interview talks about how she comes up with new ideas to write about, how the illustrations come about, and the process of creating her books.
Teaching Tolerance has a great interview with James Howe, author of the Bunnicula series and Totally Joe. It talks about him coming out as a gay man as well as diversity in general.
Here in the Bonny Glen has the first ever Children’s Literature Carnival up and running. It is a great way to find new children’s literature blogs. Enjoy!
Writing with a broken tusk is the blog of author, Uma Krishnaswami. The blog focuses on writing books for children. Wonderful insights and inspiritional ideas.
GraceAnne DeCandido is a children’s book reviewer amongst many other things. Her site offers information on how to write a good review, how to become a book reviewer, and a list of her favorite books from the last two years.
Sound Bend Tribune has a great article about art in picture books. It ends with:
“Exposing children to many different visual styles is doing them a great service, says dePaola. “Children who are picture-book age — I don’t think they have any ‘taste.’ Their taste is in formation. Let them see as much as they can, and then they’ll form their own taste.””
Exactly. Read, read, read to those kids!
ALA also has a list of Notable Children’s Videos for 2006. You will see lots of videos from Weston Woods, the high quality creator of films based on children’s picture books. Though Weston Woods videos can be prohibitively expensive for many libraries, you will want to take a look at the DVD series from Scholastic that compiles several Weston Woods films on a single DVD for a very reasonable price.
Pete Hautman, author of Godless and Invisible, has a new book coming out in May, entitled Rash. He also has an Amazon author blog that is worth checking out.
The Center for Children’s Books has announced the 2006 winner of the Gryphon Award. This year’s winner is Stinky Stern Forever by Michelle Edwards. The Gryphon Award is given to “an English language work of fiction or non-fiction for which the primary audience is children in Kindergarten through Grade 4. The title chosen best exemplifies those qualities that successfully bridge the gap in difficulty between books for reading aloud to children and books for practiced readers.”
Waking Brain Cells 