We’re back from ALA in Chicago and what a success it was! The convention center was packed with 29,000 librarians and book lovers of all ages (pretty good company if you ask me). The four day conference was a marathon session filled with meetings, author and illustrator signings, great meals, and even a ticket to […]Read more "ALA 2009: Author Signings, Newbery Caldecott Wilder Banquet, and More!"

(This entry posted on behalf of Erin Finnegan. She takes a look another one of the reasons why editors go to comic conventions—or send their minions.) Hello! Starting in July I came on board as an intern in Graphic Universe’s office in New York City. A few years ago I began writing professional convention coverage […]Read more "GU Comics Day: Finding artists in the alley"

Helping our readers stay tuned to and informed about current events is one of the key missions of the TFCB imprint. And with world events changing so rapidly, we’ve created some digital tools to help. One of these is the Visual Geography Series (VGS) website, offering users a wide range of free materials. These include […]Read more "Visual Geography Series: Staying Current"

Here are a few highlights from my time at last week’s annual conference of the American Library Association (ALA). At the Nonfiction Book Blast, I saw seventeen engaging nonfiction writers present their recent books. If you missed it, you can find out about all the books on the Nonfiction Book Blast wiki. We celebrated Lerner’s […]Read more "ALA: Taking Children’s Books Seriously"

Domenica invited me to write about my books in the new Fall 2009 TFCB series The Decades of Twentieth-Century America. How satisfying to write a book that requires research into what makes this nation tick! How special to multiply this reward by five. That is how I felt writing five books in the decades series. […]Read more "Insider’s View from Marlene Targ Brill"

I don’t think anyone who knows me well is surprised that I became an editor. I read voraciously as a kid. I wrote a ten-book series in my early childhood—a project that had me clipping photos out of magazines to use as illustrations and scrawling back-cover copy on construction-paper book jackets. (Yes, my parents were […]Read more "On Childhood Dreams and Lightning Bolt Books!"

I had the opportunity to talk to the students at the Hamline University’s low residency MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults. It’s a new-ish program, but it’s off to a fantastic start with a great faculty and great students. It was a real pleasure to be involved. One of the things I talked […]Read more "The Cocktail Party"

Last Wednesday I mentioned our new title Kung Fu Masters. This past weekend was the Asian American ComiCon (AACC) at the Museum of Chinese in America in Manhattan, where Kung Fu Masters artist Alitha E. Martinez had a table in “artist’s alley.” Author Evonne Tsang is also local, so she and I and a handful […]Read more "GU Comics Day: Taking the zombies to a con"

This past year, I had the pleasure of working with the company’s founder, Harry Lerner, on his memoir. I had been bugging him to write it since 2006, because the company’s 50th anniversary was coming up in 2009. I KNEW it would take a lot of nudging to get him going, and boy was I […]Read more "Working on a Memoir"