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.
This past summer I attended my first International Society for Technology in Education conference (ISTE), and was awestruck to be among 20,000 plus educators who share the exhilarating goal of advancing “excellence in learning and teaching through innovative and effective…
Today, TeachingBooks.net welcomes author Julie Lawson as she stops by on her blog tour to discuss her new book Ghosts of the Titanic (Holiday House, 2012).
April 15, 2012 marks the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic!…
Today, TeachingBooks.net welcomes author Tony Abbott as he stops by on his blog tour to discuss his new book Lunch-Box Dream (Frances Foster Books/FSG, 2011).
Lunch-Box Dream is a story of two families during one week in June 1959. A…
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!
My new historical fiction novel, My Brother's Shadow (FSG, 2011), is set in 1918 in Berlin during the last months of World War One. The book explores how war and the political transition following WWI impacted regular people and children in particular.