Librarian Prep Post for January

It’s November already! As the holiday seasons start to ramp up, be sure to pause for a moment to sit down, take a deep breath, and center yourself. It’s easy to forget about our own needs in these unprecedented times, but remember – you matter! Hopefully, we can help you weather the storm and prepare for your post-holiday needs with our January booklists and reader’s advisory. Discover books for Martin Luther King Day, Tu b’Shevat, Mental Wellness Month, Science Fiction Day, and more!

By Megan Ciskowski, Assistant Publicist

Check out November new releases from Lerner Publishing Group!

In preparation for election day, we explore Traditional Nonfiction with Jeff Fleischer, author of Votes of Confidence 2nd Edition: A Young Person’s Guide to American Elections. This updated edition provides the next generation of voters with essential guidance about the past, present, and future of American elections. Continue reading to learn more about Jeff’s research process, Traditional Nonfiction, and the 5 Kinds of Nonfiction.

This fall, Lerner published Girl Code Revolution and the Vidcode Coding Hacks series. These titles are active nonfiction, providing step-by-step instructions to create animations, filters, memes, and more, and provide an online sandbox so readers can practice what they’ve learned. Additionally, Girl Code Revolution highlights some of the amazing women coders that have existed throughout history and others that continue to influence the tech industry today.

To bring readers coding projects that were both challenging and fun, Lerner partnered with Vidcode, a coding platform specifically geared for young coders. To celebrate the launch of these new books, we invited Vidcode to share a little bit about themselves! Read on to learn more about them in their own words, as well as more about active nonfiction and its role in your book collection.

A guest post by Melissa Stewart

Many teachers and students seem to think that writing nonfiction requires nothing more than doing some research and cobbling together a bunch of facts, but nothing could be further from the truth. To dispel this alarming myth, fifty of today’s most celebrated authors for children have come together to share a critical part of the nonfiction writing process that often goes unseen. The result is the illuminating anthology Nonfiction Writers Dig Deep: 50 Award-winning Children’s Book Authors Share the Secret of Engaging Writing

To craft high-quality prose, nonfiction writers have to dig deep. They have to get in touch with their passions and their vulnerabilities and use them to fuel their work. Each book has a piece of the author at its heart, and that personal connection is what drives writers to keep working, despite the inevitable obstacles and setbacks.