Betsy Bird's Blog, page 83

Your Favorite Gator Aide: An Interview with John Patrick Green About Investigators

 

I like to say that I always knew he was special. Back when John Patrick Green was creating graphic novels like the Construction Kittens series and Hippopotomister, I was reading the books constantly to my own kids. Then that series he writes called InvestiGators? It started to get big. Real big. Now I’ve the honor of interviewing John today about the series, his life, his work, and pretty much anything else that comes to mind. Because my life is awesome.

Betsy Bird: John! Such a ple...

Fuse 8 n’ Kate: Uptown by Bryan Collier

Author/illustrators aren’t supposed to have favorites but what do you want to bet that there’s a special place in Bryan Collier’s heart for his award-winning Uptown? Since I lived in Harlem for 11 years, it seemed fitting for me to go through the book with Kate, 22 years after its initial publication. In the course of things Kate finds a prominent male member (if you know what I mean), copious chocolate squares, and a love of golf that surprised us all.

Listen to the whole show here on S...

Supper Time! A Delicious “How To Eat a Book” Trailer Reveal and Interview

My executive decision today was to kick us all off with a bang. And what could be bangier than books that eat children/children that eat books? That’s literary consumption in the purest sense of the term.

So every year around December I do this 31 Days, 31 Lists countdown of various Best of the Year children’s book lists. One of those lists is called “Unconventional Children’s Books” (you can see the most recent, with links to previous years, here) and this year I’ve got a ringer. I...

The Flamingo: An Interview with Guojing About Her Latest, Loveliest Creation

In the year 2015 I was leaving my longstanding job at New York Public Library to move halfway across the country to take on an entirely new life. It was a turbulent year for me, particularly as I’d felt so tuned into the children’s book world in NYC. How on earth was I going to keep up with everything, particularly when my new job had only a tangential connection to children’s books as a whole?

Guojing, photo credit Raju Chowdhury

In a year of uncertainty, there were still new books for k...

Publisher Preview: Ellen Myrick Presents Small Presses (Part Six!)

This preview of a host of relatively publishers continues! If you missed the first part of this multi-pronged publisher preview, you can catch Part One here, Part Two here, Part Three, Part Four here, and Part Five here.

One might assume that with a logo that incorporates a palm tree, Little Island might have somewhat tropical roots. One would be wrong in this assumption. This Irish publisher styles itself as “Ireland’s premiere English-language children’s book publisher.” Are there palm...

Fuse 8 n’ Kate: Bea & Mr. Jones by Amy Schwartz

“It’s like Freaky Friday but they’re both perfectly aware of what’s going on.”

If you were hoping that this episode of the podcast would begin with me doing a variation on the Counting Crows song “Mr. Jones” then BOY do you know me well! In honor of its brand new republication (all thanks to its 40th anniversary) we’re tackling this Amy Schwartz classic about finding happiness in a bureaucratic society. How does this book stand up after all this time? Is it still memorable? Does it still ...

Review of the Day: The Kaya Girl by Mamle Wolo

The Kaya Girl
By Mamle Wolo
Little, Brown and Company
$16.99
ISBN: 9780316703932
Ages 9-12
On shelves now

Windows, mirrors, and sliding doors. Dr. Rudine Sims came up with that idea of what books for young people should be. You should have books that show you other lives, books, that reflect your own life, and books that help you cross over from your life into a different one. Here in America so much of that phrase has focused primarily on race. This makes a lot of sense, considering our history....

How to Win an Award and Conquer the World: A Little Feminist Interview with Brittany Murlas

Imagine, if you will, a board book winning a major ALA Youth Media Award. Not a Caldecott, as you might think, or a Newbery. Not a Sibert or an Odyssey or even a Geisel. No, I’m taking you back to the early hours of January 25, 2021 when the board book We Are Little Feminists: Families went out and won an honest-to-goodness Stonewall. And not an honor even but the Award proper. It was, and I truly believe this, the only time a board book has ever been featured at the ALA YMAs. But who was this p...

Family Legacies and Luchadores: An Interview with Celia C. Pérez

Come on over here. I want you to look at something:

Is that not one of the most gorgeous book jackets you’ve ever seen? Created by artist Steph C it has to go down as one of the most eye-catching of the year.

Storytime now. Long ago when I worked as a children’s librarian at NYPL, we hosted a lot of groups of kids at the Children’s Room at 42nd Street. One day a big old group of kids came in and so I did my usual schtick of telling them how a library works, booktalking three books, et...

Fuse 8 n’ Kate: Three Days On a River In a Red Canoe by Vera B. Williams

As I explain on the show, about a week before Erin Overbey was fired from the New Yorker and the full extent of that whole affair came to light, there was a rather impressive article called What Should a Queer Children’s Book Do? In it I was very impressed by the people who were tapped to give their opinions. Kyle Lukoff and Justin Richardson and Sarah Brannen, just to name a few. K.T. Horning, “who recently retired as the director of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center of the School of E...