"Sometimes as an autistic you can mask your true self from the world so much, even hiding from yourself, that until instead of too much, you become nothing at all." “Is this too much?” I asked myself, hunched over my notebook as I scribbled plans for a new story. My last young adult fantasy had featured a fat statue and an autistic poet. Two parts of my identity neatly cleaved into two different characters. But the idea had just struck me that for my next project, the fat shepherdess who wants to be an inventor to the king and the painter who suddenly finds himself the extremely re ..read more

“She won’t sit still during class.” “If she focused more, she’d do so much better.” “She spends too much time talking and not enough time doing.” “How do you make her listen, because she doesn’t listen to me.” “She’s not trying hard enough.” “She’s so immature compared to her classmates." From the moment she could speak, we knew our bright, highly creative, physically active daughter was “different” -- so my husband and I sent her to the local private school. We hoped the small class size and additional resources could provide whatever help she required. The first couple years were fine ..read more

    Post by Quinn Wyatt Why would anyone write a book about a kid living with Crohn’s, an incurable chronic disease with super embarrassing symptoms?   Because slightly over 1 million people in the US live with Crohn’s disease. And, out of those million people, about 80,000 are kids. Kids like Tess Medina, the main character in GUT REACTION. Kids like me.   I grew up with a writer for a mom, so it seemed like a no-brainer to ask her to write a book about a kid living with Crohn’s, because I thought it would be helpful. I was pretty surprised when she turned me down. Many ..read more

I was diagnosed with dyslexia when I was seven, after my second-grade teacher noticed I wasn't making the progress in reading and spelling that I should have been. Despite benefiting from early intervention and support, I struggled to maintain a healthy self-esteem and often felt lost, isolated, and confused by the world around me. I struggled to grasp what came quickly to others and developed clever coping mechanisms to compensate for areas I was lacking in. Now, as an adult looking back, I desperately want to help young students with learning differences feel seen and understood.&nbs ..read more

In honor of #CerebralPalsyDay, what follows is a short roundup of relatively new books that were group-curated by readers and writers with cerebral palsy and/or firsthand disability experience. These are books that celebrate, that portray strong characters, and that bust disability stigmas! We love stigma-busting! If you have suggestions of other new books to add to this list, please do so in the comments! On his twelfth birthday, Drew Daniels receives a chunk of alien spacecraft. It's the coolest present ever. But then a Martian secretly comes to take the piece back and gives Drew an even mo ..read more

We all absolutely adore Mr. Schu. The work he has done around this country (and world!) as a literacy ambassador, a librarian, and a champion of children and reading, is tremendous. He has touched and changed innumerable lives. And he will continue to do so, perhaps more than ever, in his new, beautiful, searingly honest novel-in-verse, ,,LOUDER THAN HUNGER. If you are familiar with John's blog site, ,,Watch.Connect.Read,, you'll know he follows a format where he traditionally asks his esteemed author +/or illustrator guests to finish his purple sentences. Well, we thought it would be fun to ..read more

In The Color of Sound, the main character, 12-year-old Rosie, can see music as colors, and can hear colors as music -- one of the more commonly talked-about and depicted forms of synesthesia. Like Rosie, I have synesthesia, too, though not this exact type. There are over 80 known 'varieties' or types of synesthetic experiences that brain scientists have identified, and I purposefully chose to give Rosie a different kind of synesthesia than the kinds I have. It felt awfully intimate to put the truest, most specific contents of my brain on the page and to try to describe the ways that my mind p ..read more

Emily Dickinson said, “Dogs are better than humans because they know but do not tell.” Of course, I agree. Some of my best friends have been dogs. I have never met a human, or any other creature for that matter, that encompasses such a perfect blend of childlike innocence and the capacity for such unconditional love. As a sensitive kid, who wore her emotions on her sleeve and struggled with body image issues, dogs, and cats, and horses—but especially dogs—were always my safe haven, the place I could let my guard down and be completely myself. As a girl growing up in the South in the 1980’s ..read more

My oldest daughter weighed less than two pounds when she was born at 26 weeks. For three months, I spent every day beside her in the hospital watching machines that monitored her oxygen, her temperature, and her heartbeat.   I panicked each time a sensor beeped or a number dropped. Until the day an amazing NICU nurse put her hand on my shoulder and said, “Watch the baby, not the monitor.”   She meant that if my daughter’s color was good, if her breathing was regular, and if her body was calm, then she was very likely fine, no matter what the machines said. I had to learn to read my ..read more

Anxiety can be sneaky. It appears in ways we don’t expect, in moments we can’t predict. Like my young protagonist in Drawing Deena, I discovered that I was clenching my teeth at night when my dentist confirmed I had cracked a molar. To be honest, like Deena, I had ignored my dentist’s warning that I was likely clenching and stress grinding until the evidence flashed across an x-ray screen. For others in my family, anxiety has taken on different forms. Rather than causing dental concerns, for them it’s manifested as nausea, a churning of the insides, and the urge to vomit. That was even sneaki ..read more