Tips for Children’s Authors & Illustrators Week: First Week in February

Check your library copy of Chase’s Annual Events and among such upcoming celebrations as American Chocolate Week and National Week of Student Action, you will find Children’s Authors and Illustrators Week (CAIW), annually the first week in February.

This week was started several years ago by authors and illustrators in Children’s Authors Network (CAN!), who wanted to celebrate the school visits,

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Author Interview: Lisa Papademetriou and Chris Tebbetts on M or F?

M or F? by Lisa Papademetriou and Chris Tebbetts (Razorbill, 2005). From the promotional copy: “Frannie and Marcus are best friends-brain twins, in fact. They share a love of Bollywood movies, an unbridled passion for pizza, and the fact that neither of them has ever had a boyfriend. At least Marcus has an excuse-eligible gay boys are hard to come by in their small Illinois town.

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Four Publishing Presidents to Share the Stage on the SCBWI 35th Anniversary

A typical children’s publisher receives 5,000 or more submissions a year and publishes only a handful, according to editors. With so many people dreaming of writing a children’s book, and fewer than one-tenth of one percent of manuscripts making it out of the slush pile, sometimes it seems almost impossible to break into print. The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators is an organization that can help open doors.

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Kissing Brendan Callahan by Susan Amessé

Kissing Brendan Callahan by Susan Amessé (Roaring Brook, 2005). Sarah wants to be a writer. She wants to enter a local writing contest, judged by her idol–romance writer Antonia DeMarco, and she wants to win first place. Unfortunately, her just-the-facts mom says she’s ineligible to enter and has a less-than-stellar opinion about Antonia herself. But Sarah has a solution,

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