Sunday Afternoon Visits: It's Good to be Back Edition

I'm still digging out, and can make no promises that this will be comprehensive. But here are a few things from around the Kidlitosphere worth noting:

• April is National Poetry Month. Several children's book bloggers will be highlighting and self-publishing poems during the month. If you are looking for a place to start, I recommend Wild Rose Reader, Elaine Magliaro's blog. In this post, she outlines her plans for the month, while in this one she offers "links to websites with poetry resources for children, teachers, homeschoolers, and anyone else who happens to be a poetry lover like me." Gregory K will also be publishing a poem every day during the month at GottaBook. He's even set up a subscription list (via Google Groups), so that you can receive just his original poems via email, as they are published. Cloudscome at A Wrung Sponge also plans to celebrate National Poetry Month, "by posting a haiga (haiku and image) every day for the whole month." She links here to several other bloggers who have plans for posting poems or about poetry themes in April. Cloudscome promises to keep her list of participants up to date, so check there for links to other blogs.
• Anastasia Suen has put together two useful new lists on her blog (with help from the Kidlitosphere Yahoo Group). One is a list of bloggers interested in reviewing children's and young adult books, and the other is a list of Kidlitosphere bloggers interested in hosting blog tours. I have, incidentally, refrained from listing myself on either list, because although I am certainly still interested in writing book reviews, I feel like I have as many sources of review titles right now as I can possibly handle. Hopefully one day I'll be able to find more time for reading and reviewing books...
• Ellsworth's Journal will be hosting the April Carnival of Children's Literature. As a theme, "The Writer is inviting children's book bloggers to create their own society for their favorite children's book series or author or character. Make up your own fan club! Plan expeditions to author sites, conventions, newsletter, club activities, menus for dinners, secret handshake. Best of all, you are President for Life and you get to wear a big shiny medal on a red ribbon." You can find details here. Submissions are due April 25th for an April 30th carnival. The March Carnival of Children's Literature will be posted any day now at Scrub-A-Dub-Tub, The Reading Tub Blog. I'll be looking forward to that, since I missed so much blog reading in March.
• Colleen Mondor and the SBBT/WBBT team have put together another cross-blog collaborative effort. Earlier this week, they celebrated Canada Day, with a host of posts about Canadian authors. You can find the recap, with links to the various participating blogs, here. See also this post by Colleen about what's required to pull off these sorts of collaborative efforts in general.
• I'm very late in announcing this, but Australian author Sonya Hartnett won this year's Astrid Lindgren award. The prize is approximately $800,000 (US), making it a tremendous reward for hard-working children's authors. You can see all of the details at Cheryl Rainfield's blog, including this inspiring statement from Sweden about the award: "The prize is also a signal to institutions and organisations around the world that good children’s and youth literature is worth millions. And our children are worth more than millions. Good children’s literature gives the child a place in the world, and the world a place in the child.”
• Congratulations to the Kidlitosphere's own Jay Asher of the Disco Mermaids, whose Thirteen Reasons Why recently made it's debut on the NY Times Bestseller list. You can read about Jay's joy here. It's fabulous to see a book that's so substantive doing so well. Just this week I received this anonymous comment on my review of the book: "This book is amazing. This book was still on my mind even after I finished it. It really is something you have to read to understand. I have a friend who considered suicide, and I was just one of many people who helped her through it. I have sort of a connection to this book, and that just made it even more amazing." And that, my friends, is what writing about "edgy" subjects is all about.
• There's a fun discussion going on at Big A little a about "literary deal-breakers", books that could lead you to break off a relationship if you found out the other person said they were a favorite. Kelly's post was inspired by one at PaperCuts.
• At The Only True Magic, Snow Wildsmith shares a list of 14 recommended books for middle school boys. She notes: "I've included a rough idea of the year in middle-school I'd recommend the book for. You'll notice, though, that I've left off some standard titles like Louis Sachar's Holes and Anthony Horowitz's Stormbreaker in favor of titles that might have flown a little further under the radar." I've only read four of the recommended titles, and highly enjoyed three of them, so I think I need to get reading some of the others on Snow's list.
• And finally, Kathy (a fellow Red Sox fan) celebrates the start of baseball season at Library Stew. She'll be reading Casey at the Bat at her library media center this week. In her post, she shares some of her favorite baseball books and baseball links. Not to mention a very fun video of Red Sox fans singing Sweet Caroline at Fenway (fun if you're a Red Sox fan - probably not of general interest). As an interesting (to me) coincidence, both Snow's post above and Kathy's post, published within a few minutes of one another, mentioned Mike Lupica's Heat, which was one of my favorite titles from 2006. Great minds think alike, I guess.

And that's all for today. I went ahead with the "Mark all as read" in Google Reader, and now I'll be starting the week off fresh. Now to get back to writing reviews this week...

Comments

[Sarah Miller]

I'd like to be on a couple of Anastasia Suen's lists -- are there any special qualifications or do you just have to say "pretty please"?

[Elaine Magliaro]

Jen,

Thanks so much for calling people's attention to kidlit bloggers who will be highlighting poetry during National Poetry Month.

I hope moving day wasn't too stressful.

[cloudscome]

Glad to hear you landed safely in your new digs! Thanks for linking all the poetry posts. I'm looking forward to a full month.

[Gregory K.]

Thanks for the link... and good to see ya back, too. And may I just say "Go Sox!"? Thanks. I feel better for having said it :-)

[Jen Robinson]

Sarah, I would imagine that "pretty please" (and, you know, actually having a kidlit blog) would do the trick. I believe that the reviewer/blog tour host lists were from databases compiled internally on the Kidlitosphere Yahoo Group, so people chose to have their names included. But I'd write to Anastasia and ask - I'm sure that your site would be a valuable addition.

Elaine, Cloudscome, Greg, you are all very welcome for the mentions. Thanks for doing so much for poetry month (and really, poetry all year round).

Elaine, the move was pretty stressful, but as I think they always are, but we're getting settled. I guess if you survive, then it wasn't "too stressful".

And Greg, you may say "Go Sox" whenever you like on this site. I'm all set with my MLB Extra Innings package, to watch as many games as time allows.

[Anastasia]

Thanks for the linkage, Jen. I'm so glad you're back!

[Jen Robinson]

Can't tell you how glad I am to be back, too, Anastasia.