MEMBER BLOG TAG: children's books
| Friday, April 29, 2011 3:14PM | | | | Children’s Authors on Voice & Place | Tags: World Voices Festival, children's books, Nicaragua, New York City
| | | The two empty chairs onstage at the PEN Children’s Committee panel, “Who Tells the Story? Children’s Book Writers Talk About Voice,” seemed to have been left there by accident, but unforeseen circumstances kept two participants from attending. Children’s Committee chair Susanna Reich fell victim to laryngitis, so her predecessor, Fran Manushkin, graciously welcomed the near-capacity crowd. Panel moderator Lisa von Drasek was also unable to attend because of an injury, and Jenny Brown did an admirable job of taking her place. She came with a list of thoughtful questions, tailored to each panelist, that elicited insightful responses.
Although I’m familiar with Gioconda Belli’s poetry, fiction, and acclaimed memoir of living in Nicaragua in the years before the 1979 Sandinista Revolution, The Country Under My... | | | | | | | Thursday, April 28, 2011 9:03PM | | | | Writing transmedia for children... | Tags: transmedia, children's books, storytelling, voice
| | | A humid night at the Greenwich House, with a backyard populated by cherry blossoms and miniature meals, and by those I mean appetizers.
Greenwich House is some sort of music school, but the authors seemed right at home under large photo prints of the city's architectural landmarks. The three authors had written over a hundred books between them.
Peter Lerangis and Rebecca Stead both live in New York. Giancola Belli is from Nicaragua. I'm not sure where she lives, as she didn't say. Belli moved me with a lovely story about a child who invents the butterfly; Stead reached me with her humility and evident love for the city of her childhood; and Lerangis impressed me with his ability to... | | | | | | | Thursday, April 30, 2009 2:04PM | | | | Children's Books in a Digital Age | Tags: children's books, young adult, Kindle, multimedia, No Child Left Behind, World Voices
| | | When I visited my family in Houston last month, I found that my soon to be 75-year-old mother was the only one in her social circle who had not yet purchased a Kindle. While there, I attended a book club that had been reading my novel Dirt Cheap. The women in the book club, who ranged in age from 50 to 80, all owned Kindles and had already loaded them with multiple books. On my return to New York City, I stopped off at a Spanish-language short-story discussion group at McNally & Jackson, and one of the members of the group had loaded his story onto his iPhone. I asked to try out the iPhone and promptly deleted the story. Oops.
Having been exposed... | | | | | | | Thursday, April 30, 2009 10:09AM | | | | Hey, Reading Should Actually Be Fun | Tags: Children's Books to Create a Lifeloving Love of Reading, Mary Ann Hoberman, Francine Prose, Vera B. Williams, Meir Shalev
| | | Using Children's Books to Create a Lifeloving Love of Reading was a great event. Why it attracted the oldest crowd in the history of World Voices, I have no idea, but maybe it's because we're all stuck in our youth. We can't get out but we can't go back either, so we have to turn to literature to save ourselves from the horror of being adults.
"I still live in my pre-school years," Mary Ann Hoberman said.
"I have total recall of my childhood." Vera B. Williams agreed. "But what I'm most concerned with is how we connect our stories with love ... how we make the words get up and dance."
The words did get up and dance this afternoon. Meir... | | | | | |
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