Betsy Bird's Blog, page 219

Metareading in Picturebooks: A Dissertation by Melanie McGilloway

The Twitter has its uses, you have to admit.  The other day I was looped into a conversation there with a seemingly simple question: What are the picture books that favorably portray children reading ebooks?  This question turns out to be a lot more difficult to ascertain than you might think.  Over the years we’ve seen a whole slew of anti-screen picture books.  The message is always very clear.  Unplug and read a book kids!  Does anyone ever say “plug in and read a book” instead?

After wrac...

Funny Girl Week: Some of the Funniest Children’s Books of 2017 by Women

Well, we’ve had a good week of it. And figuring out how to end my ode to all things funny and womanly wasn’t easy.  I thought about doing a post on funny writers for children from other countries.  I considered looking at funny female character in children’s books.  I definitely wanted to mention in some way the group Gold Comedy for Girls in NYC that teaches girls and women how to do stand-up comedy.  But in the end I decided that this would be the best way to end things once and for all.  L...

Funny Girl Week: In Defense of Harley Quinn – The Rarity of the Female Trickster

In 2007 Viking, an imprint of Penguin Group USA, published the anthology The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales. It was edited by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, and edited edited (if there’s a better term of this, I’d love to hear it) by the great and wonderful Sharyn November (who, as luck would have it, initially edited my own book Funny Girl, which we’re celebrating on the blog this week).  Prior to reading this book I was vaguely aware of trickster tales as a form, but had put no real thought a...

Dead Funny: Who Says All the Funny Women Are Alive?

Today marks Day 3 in our celebration of humor, women, and children’s literature.  Produced in tandem with the release of my anthology of funny female writers and illustrators (Funny Girl, Viking) so far we’ve seen the following:

Day #1: Children’s Book Biography of Funny Women

Day #2: What Other Projects My Contributors to Funny Girl Are Up To

Today we switch gears a little to honor women who wrote funny books for kids, or were funny themselves, and are now gone.  It wasn’t hard to come up wi...

Happy Book Birthday, FUNNY GIRL! Celebrating My Contributors Properly

It’s here it’s here!  Break out the marching band!  Hand out the noise-makers!  Give old Grandma Sally a kazoo to toot because my anthology Funny Girl‘s book birthday is here at last!

To properly celebrate today I’ve a couple special treats in store. First off, I want to honor the brave women who agreed to be a part of this anthology.  If the book has any merit it is because of their blood, sweat, and talent.  And, thanks in entirely to Amy Ignatow, now you can see them all in one place at on...

Funny Girl Week: Bios of Hilarious Women

At long last it’s almost here.  Tomorrow is the book birthday and release date of my anthology FUNNY GIRL: FUNNIEST. STORIES. EVER. published by Viking Press (Penguin Random House).  To celebrate, I was wracking on brain on how to celebrate properly. Then it came to me: Let’s do an entire week celebrating funny women and children’s literature together!  And to kick things all off, I decided to start with the shortest post I could think of:

Children’s Biographies of Funny Women. Of which ther...

Shooting Off (on) the Canon

I’m no bookstore employee, so my interest in the Indies Choice Book Awards, voted on exclusively by booksellers, is one of curiosity more than anything else.  These awards, for example, determine the E.B. White Readaloud Award winners as well as which book will be included in the Picture Book Hall of Fame (nominees are all available to view here).  Now when I first saw that the nominees were up and running for 2017 I zipped on over to the site to see who was up for contention.  Let’s see . ....

Celebrating Small Publishers: An Array of Remarkable 2017 Titles From the Smallest Houses

When I was getting my library degree in grad school I remember quite clearly a class where we were told about the various publishers creating children’s books. At the time The Big Five (Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Harper Collins, and Little, Brown) were still The Big Six (before Penguin and Random House became as one) and my professor even went so far as to explain which publishers were owned by companies in other countries. It was information that, at the time, I wasn’...

The Mystery of the Missing Tink and the Girl Who Would Be President

Part of what I like about this blog so much is its ability to crowdsource information.  Take my updated version of The Complete Listing of All Public Children’s Literature Statues in the United States.  The post got a nice response and an even nicer series of statues I’d never even heard of.  A new How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight in Abilene, TX (the children’s literature statue capital of America)? An Alice in Portland, OR? An L.A. Mother Goose?  I haven’t had time to update the list with all...

Wordless Picture Books: A List

So I was at the New England chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators this weekend.  It turns out, this is the largest regional chapter in the States.  And viewing the 700+ attendees myself firsthand I can certainly believe it.  Many thanks, then, to Josh Funk, Sera Rivers, & Marilyn Salerno for inviting me.

Lots of folks came up to speak to me after my talks, but one in particular is the inspiration for today’s post.  She mentioned to me that she’s hoping to work wit...