If your patron base, ages 7-18, is anything like mine they are either on the giant reserve list for one of your library’s copies of The House of Hades or already dying to talk about every single detail with you. If your patron base is like my patron base they are already fiend’ing for the next Rick…
Why did I decide to host this event? Oh, if you work in a library and with children and teens you know why. You know that, for them, Minecraft rules their imaginations. At my library, the kids will play Minecraft for hours at a time. They play it together, they watch each other play…
Quick: how many books have you read where the main character has autism or autism spectrum disorder? Now: how many of those books were written by an author who openly speaks about their own autism spectrum disorder? For me, I realized that while I could come up with a few titles answering the former question,…
“The hole is what lets it change.” What a moment it is – the moment of recognition, the moment when you feel like someone has seen you. For me, this moment of connection sends an almost physical jolt through me. One of the things I loved the most about Linda Urban’s artfully crafted, painfully beautiful book The…
What’s the scariest thing you can think of? A thing that is almost universally feared? Spiders? Clowns? Public speaking? What about … creepy dolls? You know the kind, the kind that have heads that seem to sit uncomfortably on their cloth shoulders, the ones with porcelain arms and legs that bend in unnatural ways, the…
Welcome to anyone reading this who attended the New Mexico Library Association’s pre-conference on middle grade literature and library services this past Wednesday as presented by me and Ellie Simons! I hope you enjoyed yourself and learned at least a few new things to try in your library. Let me apologize for the technical difficulties…
I love middle grade! Boy, do I love middle grade! This is one of the reasons I am so crazy about Walden Pond Press – they are an amazing middle grade imprint full of all sorts of interesting stuff written for the 8-14 year old range. I was super-excited for the chance to work with…
What, exactly, is the ever-elusive “middle-grade” novel? Oh sure, that seems like an easy question, doesn’t it? It’s a novel written for middle-school audiences. But middle-school isn’t even the same everywhere. In my community, middle-school is seventh and eighth grade only. This is a great example of the larger question: where does “middle grade” fiction begin anyhow? …
Welcome to 2012!! The blog lives! Sorry for the absence – I just went through one of those periods when I couldn’t quite get a blog to come out the way I wanted. I was still reading and tweeting away, but blog just wasn’t happening. One of the things I love the most about my…
First things first! The Las Conchas fire is 50% contained and the evacuation has been lifted, meaning I’m back at home and the library is back to business as usual. They lifted the evacuation two Saturdays ago and we re-opened with normal hours and programs on Tuesday the 5th. It was a truly crazy and…
