Blog Tour: Shirley Reva Vernick
The art of writing presents challenges for even the most experienced authors. My biggest struggle in writing the YA novel The Blood Lie (Cinco Puntos, 2011) revolved around voice. This book is based on a real hate crime that happened in my hometown in the 1920s. I really wanted to give the characters authentic Jazz Age voices, and I was committed to narrating the complex events in a credible, coherent way. It wasn’t easy!


An interactive whiteboard is a fabulous classroom tool that brings multimedia to the forefront of literacy and library lessons. By shifting the instructional focus from a teacher presentation to classroom-wide engagement, a whiteboard encourages participation and discussion while supporting kinesthetic learners.
I'm a writer because I never had the Creative Writing Class. You know the one I mean, the one that exhorts, "Write what you know. Write from your own experience." If I'd been limited to writing what I know, I'd have produced in these past forty years one unpublishable haiku.
September 24th begins Banned Books Week—an annual celebration of the freedom to read organized by the American Library Association (ALA). In this month’s column, TeachingBooks.net presents multimedia resources on the 10 most frequently challenged books of the past year.