Betsy Bird's Blog, page 93

Newbery/Caldecott 2023: Spring Prediction Edition!

2023. Wow. I dunno, but that year looks more futuristic to me when it’s written down.

But yes! The time has come again. Every year I create four different Newbery/Caldecott posts, one for each season, to try and predict where the Newbery and Caldecott Awards might go the following spring. My track record is . . . well, it does tend to be a little spotty. But please bear in mind that when the Spring Prediction Edition comes out, I haven’t seen the bulk of the fall releases. As such, here’...

Where Butterflies Fill the Sky: Talking About Flamingos and Watermelons with Zahra Marwan

If you were to graph the number of children’s picture books in which immigration plays a significant role, you’d see a marked uptick when you hit the last decade. Part of what makes this so interesting is the wide array of books that have come out. Wordless, metaphorical, deadly serious, or done with exquisite illustrations. Some are memoirs while others are wholly fictional. Sometimes it feels like I’ve seen so many, and yet I’ve never seen anything like Zahra Marwan’s WHERE BUTTERFLIES FILL TH...

Where Butterflies Fill the Sky: Talking Flamingos and Watermelons with Zahra Marwan

If you were to graph the number of children’s picture books in which immigration plays a significant role, you’d see a marked uptick when you hit the last decade. Part of what makes this so interesting is the wide array of books that have come out. Wordless, metaphorical, deadly serious, or done with exquisite illustrations. Some are memoirs while others are wholly fictional. Sometimes it feels like I’ve seen so many, and yet I’ve never seen anything like Zahra Marwan’s WHERE BUTTERFLIES FILL TH...

You Can’t Bring That To America (But Boy, I Wish You Could)

This seemed an appropriate post to round out my Bologna coverage with today’s final post. If you’d like to see even more books, videos, and reports, you can follow me on Instagram and Twitter. That’s where a lot of original content that didn’t quite fit into the blog format ended up.

Having already done a post on those books I saw in Bologna that would transfer beautifully to American shores, let us now turn our sights in another direction: Books that are fantastic and will never ever ever e...

Discussion: The Reasons Behind a Choice – Meeting With the Illustrators Exhibition Jury 2022

If you saw my brief encapsulation of a selection of the art included in the Illustrators Exhibition here at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair then you may be curious about the process. As I was quick to discover, American children’s books were submitted, but only one single book included (kinda puts you in your place, which is not a bad thing). But how did the panel decide on what to and not to include? This panel provided a glimpse into the criteria and how you go through 3,873 artists from ...

Discussion: Translating Comics and Graphic Novels

Translators: Invisible but essential.

This was actually the first panel I attended while at Bologna. I hadn’t really gotten into the groove of how best to report, I’m afraid, so this won’t have the direct discussion I was able to attain with some of the other panels. Instead, I’d like to just focus on some of the highlights from the talk that I thought were really interesting.

Now this discussion was held in a part of the fair called the “Translators Cafe”. And regular talks on the sub...

This One’s For the Publishers: Books You Should Bring to America

I’m no publisher. I’m a librarian. And I suspect that if I were a publisher, one of my true pet peeves would be some hepped up lady with a Master’s in Library Science coming on over, telling me how to do my job when it comes to overseas acquisitions. Probably happens all the time. Dewy-eyed bibliophiles see some beautiful and thoroughly esoteric picture book from another nation and beg the publishers to print it here in the States, heedless of whether or not it would, as they say, play in Peoria...

Discussion: Spotlight on Africa – In Their Own Words: Storytelling to Protect Vanishing African Languages

The real reason to come to the Bologna Children’s Book Fair is to encounter topics and discussions you simply could not find anywhere else. What better example of this could there be then this panel discussion on attempts of different people in the book industry in different nations in Africa to preserve, protect, and retain languages that might otherwise vanish? To say that I knew nothing of the topic would be an extreme understatement. This was one of the discussions I was most excited to ...

Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award: The Winner of 2022 – Eva Lindström!

The degree to which Americans don’t really pay much attention to the international community is beautifully summed up by the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. Never mind that several American have won it periodically over the years. Never mind that it’s a prize of 5 million krona / $462,00 euros / $550,00 U.S. dollars, an amount just behind the Nobel prize (“And, of course, much more important” said the Chair of the Award to laughter). Awarded by the Swedish Arts Council, that’s where the mone...

Panel Discussion: Critical Thinking – The Role of the Critic in Promoting Books

Professional criticism of children’s literature would be a topic I’d follow with interest to the ends of the Earth. Alas, the sole panel I could find on this topic at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair was entirely based on American and English criticism and a mere half an hour long. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the panelists in question included our own esteemed homegrown critic Leonard Marcus, featured alongside author/critic Michele Roberts.

Here’s a quick rundown of the d...