May 2015

EXPERT PANEL TO DISCUSS SOCIAL MEDIA

On May 21, a panel of experts will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of various social media platforms, how each can best be used and the audiences they reach. The panel will tell writers and illustrators how to use social media to promote their work and engage with others in the field.

Moderator Caroline Tung Richmond's writing has appeared in the Baltimore Sun and Highlights for Children, on USAToday.com and elsewhere. Her debut novel, The Only Thing to Fear (Scholastic), tackles the question: "What if Hitler had won World War II?" Her second novel, out in summer 2016 from Scholastic, will focus on female spies in Occupied France. Richmond is the co-treasurer of We Need Diverse Books, a nonprofit that encourages diverse voices in children's publishing.


The panelists are:

Anna Irwin, communications director, National Geographic Society. Irwin oversees communications and publicity for the newly restructured Education and Children’s Media Division at National Geographic. She earned her master of arts in law and diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University and her bachelor’s degree in international relations from Bucknell University.

Minh Le is the author of Let Me Finish!, a picture book illustrated by Isabel Roxas and scheduled to be published by Disney-Hyperion in 2016. He writes about picture books at Bottom Shelf Books (his blog), the Huffington Post and Book Riot, and as a member of the children's literature consortium The Niblings. His writing has also appeared in the Atlantic Wire, the New York Daily News and Reading Rainbow. During the day, Lê works on federal early childhood policy. He has worked in education at the national, state and local level, both in and out of the classroom. He earned his bachelor's degree in psychology from Dartmouth College and his master's in educational policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. 

Marissa Wasseluk, digital communications manager, First Book. Wasseluk has worked for the past 10 years to create and foster relationships between organizations and individuals in the digital space. For several years she taught social media workshops to nonprofits across the nation and in North Africa. Her current employer, First Book, is a nonprofit social enterprise that provides free and low-cost educational resources to underprivileged children.

Date: Thursday, May 21
Time:  11:30 a.m. "social hour"; noon luncheon
Place: Busboys and Poets 
1025 Fifth Street NW (at K Street) 

Menu: All choices $25 ($26 when paid online via PayPal)
:: CHOICE OF SANDWICH (all sandwiches served with a salad of baby greens and house-made kettle chips) ::
• Falafel Sandwich (vegetarian/vegan) with house-made hummus, cucumbers, lettuce, tomato and onion on whole-wheat pita, served with tahini sauce (vegan without tahini sauce) 
• Home-Roasted Turkey Sandwich with Havarti cheese, Dijonnaise, lettuce, tomato and onion on wheat bread
• Grilled Chicken Panini with chipotle mayo, caramelized onions, pepper jack, lettuce and tomato on ciabatta
• Portabella Mushroom Panini (vegetarian) with pesto, roasted red pepper and fresh mozzarella on herb ciabatta  

:: GLUTEN-FREE OPTION ::
Beans and Wild Rice with fresh guacamole and pico de gallo

A note regarding beverages at our monthly luncheons: The menu price includes unlimited fountain drinks, iced tea and coffee. Hot teas are available for an additional cost of $3 per person. 

RSVP NOW!

IN THIS ISSUE:

1. Three Ambassadors for Young People's Literature to Speak on May 6
2. The Red Pencil Wins the Children's Africana Book Award
3. The Guild Honors Steve Sheinkin
4. Sushmita Mazumdar Creates a Book
5. "Paper Piles," by Ellie Canter
6. Membership Renewal: Reminder
7. Member News


THREE AMBASSADORS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE TO SPEAK AT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

The Library of Congress will offer a special event during Children’s Book Week, sponsored by the Center for the Book and the Young Readers Center and in partnership with the Children’s Book Council. On Wednesday, May 6, 2015, from 10:30 a.m. to noon, all three living ambassadors for young people’s literature--Jon Scieszka, Katherine Paterson and Kate Di Camillo--will join in a conversation at the Coolidge Auditorium in the Jefferson Building to discuss their experiences and how being ambassador affected their lives and work. In addition, Christopher Meyers, son of the late ambassador and award-winning author Walter Dean Myers, will help honor his father in a tribute. The event is free and open to the public. Contact the Young Readers Center: 202-707-1950.



THE RED PENCIL WINS THE CHILDREN'S AFRICANA BOOK AWARD

The Children's Africana Book Awards (CABA) committee announces the winner of the 2015 award.  The Red Pencil (Little, Brown), written by Andrea Davis Pinkney and illustrated by Shane Evans, was the only title selected this year. This illustrated chapter book, written in free verse, is a brilliant rendering of the ethnic cleansing and large-scale violence that took place in Sudan's westernmost province of Darfur in the years following 2003. Suitable for readers ages eight and up, the novel respects both the sensibilities of young readers and the dignity of the victims. Pinkney and Evans are also Coretta Scott King Award winners.


THE CHILDREN'S BOOK GUILD HONORS STEVE SHEINKIN
by Catherine Reef

On Saturday, April 25, upon accepting the 2015 Children’s Book Guild Nonfiction Award, Steve Sheinkin explained how years of “false starts, failures and dead ends” can turn a young writer into a distinguished author—provided that writer learns the lessons offered by each misstep. Sheinkin’s persistence has enabled him to produce an impressive body of work that has earned him numerous honors, among them the Robert F. Sibert Award, the Jefferson Cup, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, a Newbery Honor, two National Book Award nominations and the YALSA Award for Excellence.

Kathie Meizner and committee member Rosalyn Schanzer
present the award to Steve Scheinkin.

Award Committee Chair Kathie Meizner praised Sheinkin’s ability “to find the heart of a story.” She noted that her committee had been particularly impressed by four of his books: The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights; Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon; The Notorious Benedict Arnold; and King George: What Was His Problem? In historical narratives that can be contradictory, complicated and at times even silly, Sheinkin’s “excitement and passion are evident,” Meizner said.

Sheinkin then took the podium to describe a journey toward literary success that began in childhood, when he and his younger brother drew comics and wrote comedy sketches that they videotaped and forced their family and friends to watch. When they were older, the Sheinkin brothers moved to Austin, Tex., to make films. They produced one, a political satire titled The More Perfect Union, which in Sheinkin’s mind was a failure.

From Austin Sheinkin moved to New York City, where he worked as a textbook author. The job was an unexpected twist in the road, he said, but it had him writing every day. And it allowed him to discover strange, fascinating stories in history, and to think for the first time about writing nonfiction. “This was a turning point for me,” Sheinkin said.

One story that captivated Sheinkin was that of Benedict Arnold, a figure he described as a “classic Hollywood loose cannon.” More than once he was told that as a hero of the American Revolution turned traitor, “Benedict Arnold makes people nervous.” Some teachers hesitated to teach his story in elementary and middle schools, because they doubted that students of that age could handle the contradiction.

Yet “history is full of contradiction,” Sheinkin knew; after all, even the founding fathers owned enslaved workers. He had confidence in students’ ability to understand that one person could be both a good guy and a bad guy, so he wrote The Notorious Benedict Arnold, which Roaring Book Press published in 2010.

Sheinkin confidently embarked on his next book project, planning to write about an 1872 scam known as “the great diamond hoax.” Too little archival material existed, though, and a “false start turned into a dead end,” he said. He looked instead at the tale of an Iowa teenager who became a Russian spy and was employed at the Oak Ridge, Tenn., laboratories where American scientists were developing the first atomic bomb during World War II. But he reached another impasse when he again uncovered too little information.

Still, he listened to a more seasoned writer who pointed him toward another young spy at Los Alamos named Ted Hall, who copied U.S. plans for the atomic bomb and gave them to the Russians. Sheinkin dug deeper and learned that as J. Robert Oppenheimer was overseeing the Manhattan project, not only were spies like Hall trying to steal the scientists’ secrets, but allied commandoes were working to disrupt German efforts to create a bomb of their own. Sheinkin had found the kind of action-packed, complicated story he likes best, and he was off and running. The result was Bomb, published in 2012.

Before long, another curious tale reached Sheinkin’s ears. It had to do with a devastating explosion at a segregated naval base, Port Chicago, Calif., in 1944, which killed 300 men. Rumored by some people to be the first atomic bomb test, the blast in fact was the tragic outcome when untrained African American crewmen were ordered to load ammunition onto a ship. Fifty survivors were charged with treason when they refused to report to their next assignment, where conditions were no better. In their ordeal Sheinkin found a significant story, which he told in The Port Chicago 50 (2014).

What’s next for Steve Sheinkin? In September Roaring Brook Press will release Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War, which Sheinkin called a “Cold War-spies-crime thriller.” And he is at work on a new book about football at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, in the first decades of the twentieth century. This book will tell a “great underdog story,” according to Sheinkin, of a team of Native Americans challenging the elites of their day and beating them at their own game. Sheinkin admitted that there was a moment while researching this book when he thought he had reached another dark dead end. “But then,” he said, “the lights came on.”

At the award celebration, the Guild donated baskets of members' books to the
libraries at King Elementary School and Kramer Middle School in
the District of Columbia.

 

INSPIRATION IS EVERYWHERE!
by Sushmita Mazumdar

As I fly to Trinidad for another UN Refugee Agency mission as an interpreter for Bangladeshi and Pakistani asylum seekers, I realize how much has happened since the last time I flew back from there, in September 2014. Then I was struggling to finish a story—Little Lantern and the Dark & Moonless Night. Today I think of the hundred copies I have to make of that same handmade storybook for two school author visits!

As part of an amazing collaboration with the Washington, D.C.-based family-engagement organization Turning the Page (TTP), 100 families will get a copy of Little Lantern and the Dark & Moonless Night. Not only that, when Ellie Canter of TTP was approached by Imagination Stage, a children’s theater and arts education program based in Bethesda, to apply for a grant from the D.C. Commission for the Arts and Humanities (DCCAH), she immediately thought of my book and upcoming visits to TTP’s partner schools.

March was Arts Education Month, and DCCAH celebrated the occasion with more than 200 arts-based workshops occurring across the District. As a result of the grant, Imagination Stage’s teaching artists created a theater-based lesson plan to introduce my book to the second graders at Savoy Elementary School through an exploration of how stories are told through mudras (symbolic or ritual gesture, as seen in yoga or Indian classical dance, performed with the body, hands and fingers) and other movements. Savoy strives to include the arts in classroom instruction and partnerships.

If you want to think of how the arts are part of this project, let me show you.

1.      It started with my daughter. She said that if I didn’t like the books out there that tell the stories of Diwali, the Indian festival of lights and color celebrated on a dark and moonless night, I should make my own. I was, after all, a book artist.

2.      As I looked online for inspiration, I saw a photo of beautiful ceramics my friend Jeff Rogers was creating in his new studio in Florida, Gumbo Limbo Pottery. His lanterns caught my eye. I wanted them for Diwali. Could my Diwali storybook be about the lantern?

3.      I looked at rangoli designs made in India out of colored powders. In the middle of them are placed diyas, or lamps. If I created a rangoli in my book, I could put a lantern in the middle instead. But what was I to create the rangoli out of?

4.      How about layering colorful Asian handmade papers? I made a sketch and tried it out. I stacked papers of different sizes—biggest at the bottom—and made a paper rangoli. I folded it in half—these would be the pages of my book!

5.      But how then to hide the text under them, so the reader doesn’t see the words when the rangoli is in full view? As I studied to give tours of the exhibit Nastali’q: The Genius of Persian Calligraphy in the Sackler Gallery of Art, I saw how Persian bookmakers put the text really close to the binding so as to show off the broad and beautifully decorated borders. I put my text boxes really close to the binding as well. Now you don’t see any text when the book or rangoli is open!

6.      But my story wasn’t working yet. I had the two characters—a writer, (me) and a potter (my friend Jeff who made the lantern). I had the story of Diwali. But who will tell the story of Diwali? I didn’t want to and Jeff couldn’t, as he didn’t know what Diwali was. Then I met Gem, the lady who sat next to me on the plane on my way back from Trinidad last September. She had worked with kids her whole life and was recently retired. As we talked about many things, we wondered what babies heard when they were still in their mothers’ bellies. Did they remember what they heard when they were born? As we wondered, the idea came to me: the lantern would tell the story of Diwali. It had heard the writer tell it to the potter when it was just a ball of clay on the potter’s wheel…

So as I think of all the arts that were integrated into this project and all the layers of inspiration found all around, I thought I’d share with you how the production of the books is going at my studio, Studio PAUSE. Maybe you can find some inspiration in this. Here are some photos:

 

First, I design and cut templates (right) of my rangoli layers, which are the pages of the book. Then, from my collection of Asian handmade paper I pick out papers that will work well together. The shapes are symmetrical, so I fold the decorative papers (left) and place the folded template on it and cut.

 

Next, I arrange the layers, keeping in mind not to repeat color combinations. I think almost every book will have a different combination of colors for the pages!

Then I fold them shut and press them down under heavy books for a few days. This flattens them so the book stays closed when complete.

Next, I add the covers. The paper I am using is called Crystallized Mica-Black. I picked it because it looks like a moonless, yet starry night! As I was sewing the covers onto the books the sun streamed into my studio and I got a picture of sunlight on my moonless nights!

 



After the covers are sewn I print out the text, cut out each panel, and put them on the pages of the book. Of course, each page is a different shape, color, and print or texture.



 

The finished book displayed with a lantern.

 

After the author visit to Savoy and the bookmaking workshop I did for parents—where they created their own books out of everyday papers—Ellie shared some musings she had as a response to the visit to Savoy. And, celebrating April as National Poetry Month, her response came as a poem.



 PAPER PILES
by Ellie Canter

Inspiration exists in a semi-circle–as the children of Savoy Elementary tug eagerly on a piece of yarn that marks their place at the author’s feet.

Inspiration spills from the edges of a sand rangoli as its patterns peter out onto paper–its colors lifted by lantern light.

nspiration asks adults to create, with papers parceled out from the textures we touch daily–the news print, the magazines, and the grocery bags that grow tired of their formal duties.

Inspiration resides in remembering how to play – especially when we have almost forgotten what that freedom feels like, as paper piles and stacks of scissors invite stories from their handlers.

And inspiration exists in sharing your work with strangers-turned-friends whose stories – like so many layers of paper, set one on top of the other, become a layering of lives, all multi-faceted and filled with strength. 

 MEMBERSHIP RENEWAL 

 

It is time to renew Children's Book Guild Membership for the 2015-2016 calendar year. A dues reminder was mailed in April. Please renew your membership before June 30, 2015. Dues can be mailed to Jacqueline Jules on the address listed on the form or paid online at   http://childrensbookguild.org/payments/608-dues-and-fees-payments. Thank you!

 

MEMBER NEWS

 

The third book in MARY AMATO's Good Crooks series, Sniff a Skunk, was released on April 28 in all formats. In these chapter books, the twins of infamous crooks have a big problem: unlike their parents, they want to do good deeds. Illustrated by Ward Jenkins.

 

 

 

 

KITSON JAZYNKA is pleased to announce the January 2015 publication of Sacagawea, a National Geographic Kids Readers Biography.

 

 

In May Sky Pony Press will release Boys Camp: Zee's Story, by Kitson and Valerie Tripp. And Kitson was a contributor to 125 Cute Animals, which will also be out in May, from National Geographic Kids. 



 

 

 

ERICA PERL's middle grade novel Aces Wild, which is the sequel to When Life Gives You O.J., came out in paperback on April 15! Erica recently traveled to Florida for "April is for Authors" and did three school visits with Palm Beach County school kids who "went to the dogs" with When Life Gives You O.J. and Erica's other books.

 

 

 

 When Life Gives You O.J. is on the Sunshine State Young Readers Award list for third through fifth graders, and both books were recently selected by the P.J. Library as P.J. Our Way selections for older students. Says Erica, "As you might imagine, I am wild about the P.J. Library program and the great state of Florida!"

 

 

 

SUSAN STOCKDALE is thrilled that a French edition of her picture book Stripes of All Types has been printed by Editions Circonflexe.

 

 

One of SALLY CANZONERI’s pictures, Roberta Wore a Red Dress, won an award in the Capitol Hill Arts League’s What’s Poppin’ exhibition, which opened on April 18. The show, at the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, runs through May 30. Sally also had a picture in the League’s previous show, Food For Thought. Sally has another picture in the Pyramid Atlantic Member Exhibition through April 26 in Silver Spring. Two more of her pictures were selected to go in the D.C. Historical Society’s For the Record exhibit at the Carnegie Library in Mt. Vernon Square. That show features images of buildings “at risk of being lost or destroyed as the city’s urban landscape continues to transform” and runs through May 27.   

 

Sally also has a solo show, Discovering DC, going up at Artspace DC late in April. The show will run through May, and possibly June. Look for an e-mail from Sally inviting you to a reception for the exhibit, when the date is set.


PHYLLIS NAYLOR announces the launch of her professionally designed website: http://www.phyllisnaylor.com/home.htm. Phyllis hopes, she says, that the new website will answer any question that any student has ever asked about her. The Guild gets a mention on the "FAQs" page!



Tweet Your News

Do you have a publication date for a new book, a local appearance coming up or an award nomination to tout? Don't be shy! The Guild has its own Twitter account (@ChildrensBookGuild) and is looking for news to tweet. Just send your news to Caroline Hickey (carolinesmithhickey@gmail.com), preferably already edited to fit the 140-character limit. If you'd like to include a link to a webpage with more information, the URL must be included in the 140 characters. URLs can be condensed at a number of sites, including http://www.tinyurl.com. If this sounds like too much effort, just send whatever you have to Caroline and she'll make the magic happen.

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NOTE ABOUT THE CHILDREN'S BOOK GUILD NEWS: Would you rather print your newsletter than read it online? Current and past issues now available for printing on the Guild's website at http://www.childrensbookguild.org/guild-newsletters. Look for the "Newsletter" tab on the left side of the Guild website. There is also a "Printer Friendly Version" link on the top left hand side of this blog.

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