A customer in Charlotte, North Carolina recently let us know that award-winning author Kekla Magoon would be visiting with their middle school students this fall. To support this author visit, we created an original Meet-the-Author Book Reading with Kekla and co-author Ilyasah Shabazz talking about their book, X: A Novel (Candlewick 2016). In this recording, they explain why they wanted to write a novelization about Malcolm X's experiences as a teenager.
I thought a lot about the impact of violence as I wrote Burn Baby Burn (Candlewick 2016). My protagonist Nora Lopez would have seen a lot that year, both inside her own family and in situations all around her.
Each month we feature free and enjoyable book contests and giveaways! We hope you will enjoy the following opportunities as well as the author and book resources available via TeachingBooks.net.
Win a free copy of Brick by Brick and …
I enjoy writing in the first person. I feel it gives readers immediate insight into a novel’s protagonist; from the beginning of the story they’re inside the head that person—with all the confusion and clarity that it entails. So, when I begin to write a book, I simply sit in a not-too-quiet place (usually the library) and have an internal conversation with whomever it is that’s narrating the work, and I start taking dictation. (Old-timer’s term, look it up.) It’s a fascinating process because so often I learn from this character that the tale I’m set on telling is all wrong.
A customer in California recently asked us to create original multimedia resources with author/illustrator Summer Brenner.
In this original Meet-the-Author Book Reading you’ll hear Summer explain her personal inspiration for writing Oakland Tales: Lost Secrets of the Town.…
I remember it clearly—the day the inspiration for Papa’s Mechanical Fish (Farrar, 2013) fell in my lap. I was sitting cross-legged on the basement floor of the Old Lighthouse Museum in Michigan City, Indiana, rummaging through a box of photographs when a crumbling, decades-old booklet slipped out from a manila folder.