The Scholastic Fall 2012 Librarian Preview + Giveaway

Now live and in your computer! It's your chance to see me and many of my Scholastic colleagues talking about the books we're publishing and love. Here's the whole thing, just under an hour long:



Or you can go to the preview page to view the preview by age range or formats. My books are, in the middle-grade section:

• Stealing Air by Trent Reedy (with a special appearance by Trent himself!)
• The Encyclopedia of Me by Karen Rivers (a book that came to me as a SQUID!)
• The Savage Fortress by Sarwat Chadda (presented jointly with Arthur, who represents Geeks, Girls, and Secret Identities by Mike Jung)

And in YA, Amber House, by Kelly Moore, Tucker Reed, and Larkin Reed, a very smart mother-and-daughter team.

I'll give away two galleys of each of them, to eight commenters chosen at random. Your task, commenters: Tell my fiance & me where we should go on vacation this summer. We can't decide.

Diversity in Children's Publishing: Some Conversations

For the past couple of years, I've had the privilege of being involved with an amazing group of editors discussing issues of diversity in children's literature. This group became an official Children's Book Council committee last fall, and this spring, we've had a series of events to mark our official debut. You can read more about the history and goals of the committee in this great Publishers Weekly article, and better still, you can hop over to the www.cbcdiversity.com website, and read the words of the committee and our guest bloggers there. This past week was an especially interesting one, with a series of posts entitled "It's Complicated!", from:

• A writer: Cynthia Leitich Smith, offering an impassioned plea for writers to recognize the need for diversity in their books
• An agent:  Stefanie von Borstel, who writes about her search for diverse authors to represent, with a couple of success stories
• An editor:  Me, talking a little (and eventually at length) about parts of my acquisition processes and issues of believability
• A reviewer:  Debbie Reese, whose posts on child_lit and her American Indians in Children's Literature blog are consistently thought-provoking.

If you hop on over there, as I hope you will, do please also check out the archives, where the members of the committee write about the paths that got them into publishing, and the conversations in the comments -- on this week's posts especially.