The most important thing I tell children when I visit schools is this: writing is sharing. I explain to them that an author isn’t someone special. An author is just someone who wants to share something, and decides to write about it. “If you become interested in something,” I tell students, “you should write about it.” I like old, traditional stories—especially those from the American Southwest. When I run across a tale that excites my imagination, I start re-imagining it and developing a version that I think will entertain children and suit my style of storytelling.
In this month’s post we celebrate our multilingual world by showcasing a variety of audio and video recordings from the TeachingBooks.net collection. These multimedia resources allow students and teachers to hear and read stories in a handful of languages. ¡Disfrute!
I’d never written anything quite like Lies, Knives, and Girls in Red Dresses. It is, after all, a collection of fairy tales. And what’s a seventy-two year old man doing fooling around with fairy tales?
This spring we’ve been busily preparing to help celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the Coretta Scott King (CSK) Book Awards. First celebrated in 1970, 246 recognitions have been bestowed since the award’s inception.
In the early years, only authors were…
When I was a kid, my dad was involved in a project to help retain and transmit Anansi the Spider stories of Liberia, where my parents had served in the Peace Corps. I remember him having a pile of type-written…
A new movie released this month is based on Kate DiCamillo’s Newbery-winning book The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread.
Explore Kate DiCamillo’s Original Author Program and…
