While the ALA awards for children's books and media (among them the Newbery and Caldcott awards) may be the most well-known, there are many other worthy awards for children's books as well. All of these are excellent sources for those looking for great reads...

Saturday, February 11th featured a remarkable event, New York City's Symphony Space's A Wrinkle in Time 50th Anniversary Event. The place was packed with a lovely range of kids, parents, and adult admirers of the book (now out in a gorgeous 50th anniversary commemorative edition) and...

My  post earlier this week on Walter Dean Myers generated some tweets including this one from NYDNBooks:

over at @huffpostbooks, teacher Monica Edinger calls WalterDean Myers remarkable. Wonder what she'd think of this:nydailynews.com/blogs/pageview...

Tuesday at the Library of Congress the remarkable Walter Dean Myers was officially presented as the new national ambassador for young people's literature. It is a splendid choice; not only are Myers' books wonderful, but as those who have seen him will attest, he is an outstanding...

Having been frequently disappointed by movie adaptations of children's books, I was skeptical when I first heard that Martin Scorcese was taking on Brian Selznick's award-winning book The Invention of Hugo Cabret.  Its original mix of text and illustration had me all the more dubious; how on earth would that...

Just in time for the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade comes Melissa Sweet's new picture book biography, Balloons over Broadway: The True Story of the Puppeteer of Macy's Parade. That puppeteer is none other than Tony Sarg, a remarkable man indeed. Author/Illustrator Melissa Sweet...

Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth with illustrations by Jules Feiffer, is celebrating its 50th birthday this year. To honor this grand classic of children's literature, Random House has come out with a new edition annotated by children's...

Last year Neil Gaiman made a a modest proposal and I eagerly responded to it. Since then his idea to give books for Halloween has grown with a site of its own and lots of enthusiasm all over the place. Having had a lot...

Nursery rhymes tend to be relegated to the realm of the very young, remembered by adults as cute little bedtime ditties. Well let me wake you all up -- First Second Books' Nursery Rhyme Comics is indeed cute, but it is also funny, clever, and highly entertaining,...

Today marks the publication of Brian Selznick's Wonderstruck, a book that lives up to its title. As he did with the Caldecott-winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret (coming out as a movie this fall), Selznick uses a unique mix of text and images to...

Reading this Roger Moorhouse piece on the eighteenth century German feral child, Peter of Hanover, reminded me of Victor of Aveyron who showed up a few decades later in France and became a tabla rasa for thinkers of the period as they contemplated what it meant to be human. And...

I live in a city and haven't driven in a million years, so I only began listening to books when I figured out that I could do so while running. While slow of foot, I'm a speedy reader and have discovered that certain books work better than others, listening-wise. I...

It is August and an odd time for kids. While some are still at camp, at the pool, on family vacations, and otherwise relaxing, others are heading back to school. Wherever they are they are probably doing a bit of reading, some because they want to and some because they...

Anyone who has read Salman Rushdie's fiction knows how lush and rich his language and imagery are.  How intriguing it is, then, to discover that his most recent book, "Luka and the Sea of Fire," inspired a competition among animation students at London's Kingston University to come up with...

My personally annotated copy of Charlotte's Web is a sad-looking thing, a paperback edition that was already showing its age in 1990 when I plucked it off my classroom library shelf to use at a Princeton University summer seminar on classical children's literature. Having never particularly cared for the book...

I've been a classroom teacher for a long time now and I'm grateful to be in a school that supports and values my way of teaching. It makes me very happy to spend my days with children who are talented, creative, and eager to learn. It also makes me very...

Recently I read A Monster Calls written by Patrick Ness from an idea by the late Siobhan Dowd which publishes in the U.K. later this week and in the U.S. in September. And now, with the announcement of Bin Laden's death following so closely on the anniversary...

Recently, Pamela Paul, the new children's book editor at the New York Times Book Review chatted with me about her background, books, and some of her plans. In the course of our communications, Pamela asked me how I found the time to blog as a full-time...

One of the great, great, great writers of fantasy is no longer with us. For so many of us who love this genre, there was no one more esteemed than Diana Wynne Jones. Not only did she explore a wide range of the genre, but she did so...

Today, sixteen acclaimed 2010 books for young readers go head to head in School Library Journal's third annual Battle of the Kids' Books. Inspired by the Morning News Tournament of Books these literary contenders are paired off bracket-style and judged by a distinguished group...