First Lady Laura Bush with Jon Scieszka, the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, who proudly displays his freshly minted Ambassador medal.

The National Book Festival took place last Saturday, in Washington, D.C. We asked the children’s world’s official emissary to share his weekend activities with us.

National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Jon Scieszka shocked the nation last weekend when he announced that he was suspending his usual Ambassador work for the weekend to “concentrate on cleaning up the mess in Washington.”

Ambassador Scieszka Acela-ed to our nation’s capital on Friday morning and got right to work. In an official Library of Congress ceremony in the Jefferson Building at 11:00 EST, Scieszka received his official Ambassador medal, and answered some hard-hitting questions from a class of local fifth-graders from Brent Elementary School.   read more

Photos from the Festival 
More than 70 authors and illustrators attended last Saturday's National Book Festival. We've gathered together a selection of photos from the event, for your enjoyment. Click here to view them.

Stephanie Lurie.

Lurie comes to Disney from Dutton Children’s Books, a Penguin imprint, where she was president and publisher, working with authors including Judy Blume, Brad Barkley, Heather Hepler and Eva Ibbotson; her nine-year tenure also saw the launch of Judy Schachner’s SkippyJon Jones series as well as the career of Printz Award-winner John Green. Lurie replaces Donna Bray, who, along with Alessandra Balzer, left Disney-Hyperion this past spring to start an eponymous imprint at HarperCollins.  

Until now. This week Abrams’s Amulet imprint published Gay America: Struggle for Equality by Linas Alsenas, which the company is touting as the first history of gay and lesbian culture for the teen market. The book chronicles the often-rocky development of queer life in the United States, from the first appearance of the term “homosexuality” in medical journals in the 1890s to early activist groups, the AIDS epidemic and same-sex marriages. “Every year there was progress made,” says Alsenas, “though there was a lot of ‘two steps forward, three steps back’—a lot of really dark decades after really open ones.”  

Before Bruel was a children’s book author, he was a bookseller—and before he was a bookseller, he was a cartoonist. Both previous professions come into play when he creates his books. “I always thought being a cartoonist would be the best job in the world, since I loved the genre,” he says. “For a while, I did a self-syndicated comic strip that appeared in papers in several cities. It didn’t earn me anything, but it gave me the opportunity to hone my craft.”  

Nancy Felton, co-owner of Broadside Bookshop in Northampton, Mass., chats with author Laurie Halse Anderson.

In addition, children’s authors and illustrators were the focus of Thursday night’s dinner. Laurie Halse Anderson (Chains, Simon & Schuster) started off the evening with a mock strip tease that revealed an IndieBound tee-shirt underneath her jacket, then proceeded to read from the IndieBound Declaration of Independence. “We are all connected,” she said. “The people who made the first revolution are brothers and sisters across our fingertips.”

Kids' Focus at NAIBA 

(From l.): Shawn Simons, a Seton Hall student whose recovery was chronicled in After the Fire; Robin Gaby Fisher, author of After the Fire; Brian Selznick, illustrator of The Runaway Dolls; and Ann Martin, co-author of The Runaway Dolls.

This year’s New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association fall conference, held from Sept. 20–22 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Cherry Hill, N.J., put children’s books and authors front and center, starting with the Early Bird Supper on opening night, which included author and illustrator Ann M. Martin and Brian Selznick (The Runaway Dolls, Hyperion). The next morning Penguin sponsored a children’s breakfast with four authors, who spoke about how they got their start writing for kids. Perhaps the most unusual tale was that of T.A. Barron (Merlin’s Dragon), who was encouraged to keep writing despite 32 rejections for his first children’s book because of a letter from Madeleine L’Engle,
who reminded him that A Wrinkle in Time was rejected 33 times.

MBA Children's Authors Make a Splash 

Laurie Keller, author of The Scrambled States of America Talent Show, speaking at the children's breakfast at MBA, telling the story of the scrambled Midwest states.

Children’s book authors were well represented among the 132 authors who joined 400 booksellers gathered at the Midwest Booksellers Association trade show in St. Paul from Sept. 25 to 27, celebrating the joy of books while discussing the business of bookselling. Several children’s book authors made especially memorable impressions upon booksellers—some of them involving animals, both real and imaginary. read more

SIBA's Gen Z and YA Educational Sessions 
While BookExpo America is the largest yearly gathering of booksellers, the nine regional trade shows for independent booksellers are often just as important as they offer a more intimate environment for seeing publishers, networking with other booksellers and participating in region-specific educational panels.

If anyone questioned why the educational panels at the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance trade show, held in Mobile, Ala., from Sept. 25 to 28, had such a strong focus on books for children and teens, the answer is in the profits. According to Association of Booksellers for Children executive director Kristen McLean, more than $10 billion in children’s books were sold in the U.S. from 2001 to 2005. And in July 2008, sales of children's and YA paperbacks were up more than 33% over the previous year.           read more

Camilla Corcoran, now a national account manager with HarperCollins Children’s Books, recently attended a reunion with her former co-workers at Eeyore’s Books for Children in New York City, to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the store’s closing.

The Eeyore's gang. Front row (from l.): Meg Belviso and Pat Miller; middle row (from l.): Ann Levine, Steve Geck, Alicia Broggio, Eden Stewart-Eisman, Kate Kubert Puls, Jill Goldin and Camilla Corcoran; back row (from l.): Constance Cochran, Sean Murtha and Brian Selznick.

Nineteen years ago, fresh from suburban Littleton, Colorado, and with all the naiveté that implies, I accepted a position at a Manhattan bookstore that was to become the best job I ever had: a bookseller at Eeyore’s Books for Children. The owner of Eeyore’s, Joel Fram, had been in business for 15 years or so by the time I came along, and owned two stores: one at E. 83rd St. and Madison Ave., and the other on Broadway at W. 79th St. Though each store had its own distinct layout, neighborhood clientele and sales patterns, they shared one important thing: a diverse and fun-loving staff that was dedicated to putting just the right book into the hands of a child—or their not-a-moment-to-spare parent or caregiver.

Sharon Hancock (now director of school and library marketing at Candlewick Press) hired me at the East Side Eeyore’s in 1989. To this day she remembers my interview. When she asked me why I wanted to work in a bookstore when all of my previous retail experience had been clothing-related, I replied, “Because I never want to sell another pair of bicycle shorts ever again.” And thus began the adventure of my lifetime.