It feels wild to think that we only have 7.5 weeks left in the school year. One of my favorite things about the school year is watching my readers and their preferences evolve over the course of our 180 days together. I’d love to know which books the readers you serve are loving these days. Please let me know in the comments. I talk about each one of the books that my fifth graders are currently reading in the video below. I hope you find some titles in the video to add to your to-read list. My readers know a book book when they read one! Colby Sharp is a husband and father of five. He teache ..read more

As a genocide survivor, so much of my life has been defined by my survival of the unimaginable during the Bosnian Genocide, as told in The Cat I Never Named. While the physical scars of hate, including the Serb military’s bombing of my home on my birthday, starvation, and isolation of living under the siege in my hometown of Bihac, Bosnia and Herzegovina, for nearly 1200 days were easier to heal, the particular harms that were inflicted by hateful language never did. They are a lifelong mark on my existence and define who I am today. After the Bosnian Genocide, I immigrated to the United State ..read more

When I first walk through the doors of a new elementary school, the atmosphere is palpable. The place is humming with laughter, chatter, a random teacher’s elevated voice.  Somebody is racewalking to the bathroom or dragging to the school office. Learning.  It smells like recess sweat.  A burst of colorful crayon art depicting friends’ faces and painstakingly-printed letters and stories are taped and pinned on the walls in neat rows down the hallway.  Then I feel a whisper of what I felt when I walked down similar school hallways as a child. Nerves? Naw. I chuckle and take ..read more

It was a honor to illustrate this collection of poems curated by Lee Bennet Hopkins. First, because I’ve been a great fan of his work for as long as I can remember. Long after I began reading his poems, I met him at an ALA conference and our conversation is a cherished memory. Second, because this collection of poems celebrates our pets and I am a lifelong animal lover. The added bonus was that many of the poems feature the same kind of animals I’ve been lucky enough to call family. Though each poems captures another author’s experience with these animals, my art, for the majority of poems ..read more

Written by award-winning journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Candy J. Cooper, SHACKLED: A Tale of Wronged Kids, Rogue Judges, and a Town that Looked Away (Calkins Creek/Astra Books for Young Readers, April 2, 2023) is the explosive story of the Kids for Cash scandal in Pennsylvania, a judicial justice miscarriage that sent more than 2,500 children and teens to a for-profit detention center while two judges lined their pockets with cash. Richie Partington of the “Richie’s Picks” blog says about this YA nonfiction page-turner: “From cover to cover, SHACKLED is a stellar read and an absolute m ..read more

FROM CHILDREN’S BOOK EDITOR TO AUTHOR I’d been working as a freelance editor for children’s book publishing houses … and dreaming about writing my own stories. At least, trying to write my own stories! I’d written different beginnings, but few endings. It’s easy to begin a story, much more difficult to finish! So, there was this little challenge sleeping inside me. When I stopped working after my first child was born, I remember thinking this pause could be a good opportunity. Well, of course, the first months, I didn’t have one minute of rest and quiet to write! But an id ..read more

FROM CHILDREN’S BOOK EDITOR TO AUTHOR I’d been working as a freelance editor for children’s book publishing houses … and dreaming about writing my own stories. At least, trying to write my own stories! I’d written different beginnings, but few endings. It’s easy to begin a story, much more difficult to finish! So, there was this little challenge sleeping inside me. When I stopped working after my first child was born, I remember thinking this pause could be a good opportunity. Well, of course, the first months, I didn’t have one minute of rest and quiet to write! But an id ..read more

For years, I had been ruminating on boundaries to give myself as an illustrator-aspiring author. There were too many open-ended possibilities, and from my perspective just too many other books already. I needed parameters, or maybe a mantra, that guided my book-making, and one that honored the picture book form.  To me, that meant intentionally leaving at least 50% of the story’s space for the pictures to tell the story. Even better so, building a visual narrative that the reader is in on that the words don’t say. (Enter THIS IS NOT MY HAT, Jon Klassen, and SAM AND DAVE DIG A HOLE, Mac B ..read more

There’s nothing quite like the first day of school. That excited-nervous, jittery-joyful anticipation of new classmates, and maybe new friends. Turns out, it’s the same feeling you get when you embark on a huge collaborative project with sixteen other authors whose work you’ve always loved and admired. And it’s also the feeling you get when you introduce that project – an eighteen-book, multi-author series – to readers for the first time. So the truth is, my heart’s beating a little faster than usual and my fingers are tingling a bit as I type this…because THE KIDS IN MRS. Z’S CLASS launches n ..read more

Like many Deaf people, I grew up in a hearing family. Sign Language didn’t exist in our house, so I had to do things my family’s way, which meant wearing hearing aids and enduring speech therapy. Because I couldn’t hear myself speak, I’d sometimes mumble or mispronounce something and be chastised for it. My brother’s nickname for me was “freak.” I never believed there was a place for me in the world, because I never saw it. I didn’t have a Deaf community where I lived. I was the only Deaf ..read more