Category: General

Inspired by the author’s childhood, this tale of a girl longing for a book to call her own warms hearts with its vivid language and beautiful acrylic portraits. In The Hard-Times Jar (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), written by Ethel Footman Smothers and illustrated by John Holyfield, Emma, the daughter of migrant farm workers, makes up stories and records them on brown paper-bag pages. [ Read the full article… ]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km5vbhrKJ8E] This past weekend, I purchased a copy of Kadir Nelson‘s picture book, We Are The Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball. I planned to read it and post a review here today. But I can’t. Not enough time. We Are The Ship is a high quality read, not a gratuitous tribute to a [ Read the full article… ]

Just in case you’re wondering, The Brown Bookshelf is not on hiatus. We’re recovering. The 28 Days Later campaign was a lot of fun, but it was a lot of work, too. In little over a month, we corresponded with 32 authors and illustrators, their agents, editors and publicists. I even spoke with one guy’s [ Read the full article… ]

I just wanted to take a second to let everyone know how excited we are about our 28 Days Later initiative, which premiers on Friday. The past couple of months have been a growing experience for me. Many of the authors we plan to profile here, I’d never even heard of until we began this [ Read the full article… ]

Some days I look up from a full day of Brown Bookshelf preparation, writing, promotion or whatever is on my plate and I wonder what possessed me to add such a detailed initiative as 28 Days Later onto my workload. I could plead temporary insanity.  But what might my Brown Bookshelf cohorts excuses be?  Could [ Read the full article… ]

Wednesdays are my day to blog here at the Brown Bookshelf and yesterday, I realized I had less than 24 hours to come up with something. I had nothing. And I was too busy to even think about it. I wanted to post an interview. Pie in the sky, Nancy Devard, illustrator of the book, [ Read the full article… ]

When I began writing for children, I searched for mentors. A kind children’s book author agreed to meet me in a local library and pass along pearls of wisdom. Her first tip: Start by reading. “Get to know the award winners,” she said and handed me a pamphlet of titles that won Newbery and Coretta Scott King awards and honors. I have a long [ Read the full article… ]

If you dropped by here earlier today and tried to download our 28 Days Later poster, I need to apologize. We had major problems…or, more specifically, I had major problems. I’ll spare you the technical gobbledegook. But after a long day and many, many, many error messages, I think the poster is finally good to [ Read the full article… ]