When young people come together through the performing arts, the effects can be transformational. Working together, they see each other as equals, learn to trust each other, and learn about lives and experience beyond their own. The effects they have…
This past spring, I joined with six other writers, librarians, and activists to create the 2015 We’re the People Summer Reading List. The most recently published book on that list is Cindy L. Rodriguez’s When Reason Breaks, the debut novel…
Serena Williams just won her twenty-first singles grand-slam title, and yet there has been more discussion about her body and femininity than about the sheer brilliance of her performance or her dedication to her sport. The U.S. Women’s National Soccer…
When 13-year-old Lionel Perez sneaks onto a construction site with his best friend, Anisa, he has no idea that their lives will change forever. Anisa hears what she thinks is a cat trapped inside a portable toilet, but it turns…
“It’s true, and I have to say what’s true,” says Charlotte in Chapter 5 of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. One can imagine the 10-year-old main character of Alex Gino’s debut middle grade novel George (Scholastic Press, August 2015) saying something…
Wherever it occurs, the process of gentrification inspires heated debate. On the one hand, new residents fix up crumbling buildings and bring new businesses to the neighborhood. On the other, these residents raise housing prices and displace longtime residents and…
By Kate Schatz (author of Rad American Women A-Z) I’ve always been a careful curator of my kids’ bookshelves, stocking them with my own childhood favorites alongside treasured classics and new finds that I think are cool/smart/gorgeous/important/not lame/etc. But as…
With her first novel for young readers (Inside Out and Back Again, HarperCollins 2011), Thanhhà Lai captured in verse one child’s experience adjusting to life in Alabama after leaving Vietnam. In Listen, Slowly, Lai explores the experience of Mai (Mia at…
Claudia Guadalupe Martinez’s Pig Park (Cinco Puntos, 2014) is a contemporary novel that depicts with affection and a light touch a bustling, though little-known, neighborhood in Chicago and an “unholy alliance” between business interests and politicians. Ever since the rendering…
The first children’s book that I’ve translated from Portuguese into English, The World in a Second, is coming out next month, and I’m currently looking for other books to translate. I’d like to translate young adult novels, to do my…
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