Happy Valentine’s Day!  It has been QUITE a while since I’ve done one of these Fusenews (Fusenewses? Fusenewsi? What’s the plural?)! Honestly, I’m not sure if they’re as pertinent anymore as they used to be. What with PW Children’s Bookshelf, and Twitter, and Facebook, and The Niblings, getting your children’s literary news has come quite a ways from the days when I used to randomly collect tidbits for my Blogger blog (and we had to walk uphill, in the snow, both ways, and we were grateful!).  All that aside, I like doing these because there are still little news items I feel that it’s beneficial to point out.  So let’s have some lovely loving posts for the day.

4,000 people attended the 25th Annual African American Children’s Book Fair on Saturday, February 4th.  Just let that number sink in a little.  Back in NYC I used to attend the annual Harlem Book Fair and it was awesome but we never saw numbers like 4K.  I sense a shift in the tides and I like it.  I also love that Javaka Steptoe made an appearance.  Yeah!

Were you aware that the New Yorker did a slideshow on their site of all the magazine covers created by Kadir Nelson?  We’ll just have to let that satisfy us until his next book comes out in . . . oh, there’s one out in June?  June then.  June.

Good old, Brightly.  I like those guys.  And not just because they happened to mention my own sweet little baby Funny Girl on their list of 17 Middle Grade Books to Look Forward to in 2017.  Doesn’t hurt, mind.  But I rather like all their lists, including the following:

• Books to Help Kids Understand What It’s Like to Be a Refugee
• Celebrating Black Authors Past and Present: Favorite Reads and Soon-to-Be Classics for Young Readers [I was flabbergasted by the range of books mentioned, to say nothing of the ones I hadn’t heard of yet]
• On Diversity in Kids’ Lit: An Interview with Ellen Oh About Flying Lessons & Other Stories
• They’re also giving away a library of books from our lists of 2017 books not to be missed. Here’s a link to the sweeps. Enter at will.

 Hm.  Funny Girl.  It feels like I haven’t mentioned that book in at least nine sentences.  Better round up the fabulous links.  Let’s see here:

•  The book has acquired its first starred review, and it’s from Kirkus no less.
• Junior Library Guild has selected the book (no small thing)
• And it received a shout-out in the Children’s Book Council’s Early Career Committee newsletter.

I’m a proud mama.

Daily Image:

Comedian Elliott Kalan may have 20.4K Twitter followers. He may have once been the head writer on The Daily Show.  He may be married to a children’s librarian.  But because he has a 3-year-old I find him most interesting because of how he’s been Tweeting about The Berenstain Bears.  As such: