Authors & Illustrators

Elaine Marie Alphin, a celebrated and award-winning children’s book and young adult writer, died August 19, following a long illness. She was 58.

Sixth and seventh grade students are always asking me for another book by Raina Telgemeier. They want the “next one,” not realizing that with the exception of her Babysitter Club adaptations, her books are stand-alones. They also don’t realize that it takes an awfully long time to write and draw a full length-graphic novel! But [...]

Kekla Magoon’s How It Went Down about a black teen who is shot by a white man, is especially timely with recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, and just the right title for young adults grappling with streaming headlines. And, a new book from the queen of verse novels, Ellen Hopkins, will entice fans of the format. The following fiction and nonfiction titles for teens will be perfect for late-summer reading and back-to-school shelf-browsing.

August is bursting with industry news: YALSA is looking for submissions for its 2014 Maker Contest; the NAACP and American Urban Radio Networks have joined forces in a reading literacy campaign “NAACP Reads"; Minnesota's Saint Paul Public Library expands its laptop training and giveaway program.

Doing intensive research in preparation for a work of nonfiction is par for the course these days for children’s book authors, but for Katherine Roy, it’s entailed getting to know animals in intimate details, from dissecting sharks to getting up close with a tranquilized elephant in Kenya.

The film adaptation for Lois Lowry's 1993 dystopian middle-grade novel The Giver is almost 20 years in the making, starting when actor Jeff Bridges bought the book option back in 1995. Fans of Lowry's book have long waited for the book's screen release coming to theaters this Friday, August 15.

After HBO talk show host Bill Maher airs a segment about a book called My Parents Open Carry, about a 13-year-old girl and her gun-toting parents, the book becomes a popular subject of mockery—with former Egmont USA publisher Elizabeth Law weighing in on the conversation.

"Adults forget what it is like to be a teen—that on their way to becoming adults they are often faced with situations they don’t know how to react or respond to. I often hear adults say, 'In my day young women/men didn’t behave this way or that way.' I have to laugh because, yes they did!"

How author G. Neri and Tampa school librarian Kimberly DeFusco helped turn a young at-risk nonreader into a Shakespeare-loving poet. As told by all three.