This week! Books! Also justice! We’ve had an incredibly distressing week in America, and I know a lot of people are wondering how to get involved and support this movement to end systemic injustice and brutality. There are tons of exhaustive resources out there, from bail funds to proposals for reform to call scripts for […]
Young Adult Literature
Writing children’s books from the inside out
So. You want to write children’s books. Do you have to know any current, modern day children? Nope. You really don’t need to know children to write children’s books. In fact, I even think it can be a hindrance for some people. The problem with writing children’s books from the outside in, as in, writing […]
Publication alert: Until It Hurts to Stop by Jennifer Hubbard
Jennifer Hubbard’s The Secret Year was one of the first YA novels I sold, and it remains one of my favorite YA novels I’ve ever read. It tells the story of a boy who has a secret relationship with a girl who dies as the novel opens. He’s the only living person who knew the […]
Race, Children’s Books and Jacob Wonderbar
There has been some justified talk about the state of race in children’s books lately. Most recently, First Book issued the infographic above about a recent survey that illustrated how few characters are non-white in children’s books. Lee and Low asked why the number of multicultural books haven’t increased in the past eighteen years. If […]
The NY Times is Creating New Middle Grade/Young Adult Bestseller Lists
When I tell people outside of the publishing world that I write middle grade fiction I usually get a blank stare. When I say I write children’s books, even children’s novels, people’s minds go straight to picture books. So, needless to say, it was with great interest that I saw the NY Times’ announcement that […]
Why Do Women Dominate YA?
NPR recently released a list of Readers’ Top 100 YA Novels, and The Atlantic wasn’t the only one to notice how female authors dominated the field: More than 75,000 votes were cast to cull the list of 235 finalists to the top 100. Also notable: Of those 235 titles, 147 (or 63 percent) were written by […]
