Waiting for the print-publishing world to settle down and start buying again a a real downer. You can start to spend way too much time trying to read the minds of editors and publishers. You wonder if you should change your style. Switch subjects? Do a complete rewrite of the manuscript you love?  And surely [...]

Barbie as computer software engineer has been creating quite a controversy. I’ve read about it in the Wall Street Journal and heard about it on NPR. Apparently Barbie has an annual career theme! Who knew? Even more astounding, an organized effort among female computer geeks hijacked the voting for Barbie’s annual career choice. They wanted [...]

Picture a hulking sophomore guy, a football player with C- grades, barely. The school gave up on him. “Take more shop” the counselor said when he dared to ask about an art course. He came from a bi-lingual blue collar home with a carpenter father and a stay at home mom. There were few books [...]

I love to write poetry with children. At a super fun after-school workshop with K-5th graders at Tabor Community Center, I chose spiders as a topic. I took the children on a spider walk (hunt) outside.  We came inside and did a group warm up by building a yarn/string spider web between us. As each [...]

I loved poetry as a child. My father read us picture books written in rhyme; my siblings and I read to each other Hilaire Bellock’s The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts and Cautionary Tales for Children; and we studied Struwwelpeter to keep us appalled. But the poetry books I kept coming back to were A.A. [...]

April is National Poetry Month! Celebrate with: Videos featuring the Children’s Poet Laureate, Mary Ann Hoberman, from The Poetry Foundation The International Reading Association, lesson plans on “Composing and Performing Found Poetry“ Activites from The Academy of American Poets Activities and more from Reading Rockets Interviews with 36 poets from The Miss Rumphius Effect 30 Poets/30 Days, new poetry [...]