The Horn Book Magazine’s own very notable beginning came one hundred years ago, in 1924 Boston. Bertha Mahony Miller, already owner of The Bookshop for Boys and Girls, took pen to paper — and The Horn Book Magazine was born, named both for an early educational reading tool and in homage to Randolph Caldecott’s art.

Poetry has so much to offer young readers: beautiful language, musical rhythms, creative formats, powerful emotions, and so much more. Yet, when it comes to award recognition, poetry has rarely had a place at the Newbery table. Just sixteen books of poetry have been recognized with Newbery Medals or Honors in the award’s one hundred years.

A poem may indicate a Black speaker or theme, but the poem as felt poetry is open to any voice. This stimulating freedom of poetry should be exploited in order that the work of the Black American poets may reach the widest possible audience. The non-Black reader should not hesitate to cross the color line in pursuit of a poem.

In our Book Reviews section, between Fiction and Nonfiction, you can often find reviews of Folklore and/or Poetry. This is an “and/or” because we don’t always have both, and sometimes we have neither. Our coverage tends to ebb and flow, as do the trends in books being published. In our earliest days, for example, and throughout various past decades, the Magazine spent more space on both poetry and folklore (for these purposes, and per The Horn Book Guide’s classification, the ­latter expanded to encompass folktales, myths, legends, and nursery rhymes).

I’m fond of reminding people that Greek mythology isn’t a compendium of dead narratives about long-dead people and distant places, pulled from a dusty old book or scroll. What we now call Greek mythology is what remains of a past culture’s most sacred beliefs — a collection of living stories, a body of tales that were constantly evolving, expanding, and growing over the centuries.

There really are no valid excuses in my mind why more adaptations shouldn't be intentionally multiracial, particularly because fairy tales (by nature) have been proven to stand the test of time (and they're also required to be taught in school curricula across the country).

For as long as I can remember, I have had three loves: jazz, poetry, and history. Those passions merged in my 2000 nonfiction title The Sound That Jazz Makes — a manuscript that was rejected more than a dozen times. The book’s first review was so negative that I cried. But then it won the Carter G. Woodson Book Award from National Council for the Social Studies — my first national honor. I had arrived!

I love chocolate. I love fruit. But I prefer to enjoy them separately. If, on the off chance, I do bite into a clever combination of the two, it is generally after I’ve been given some kind of heads-up — perhaps one as simple as the label on the inside cover of a box of assorted chocolates. When it comes to nonfiction, I feel the same way. Give me facts, or give me fiction...

Graphic novels for middle graders have a unique position for some readers, situated between picture books and non-illustrated works and straddling subject matter suitable for their developmental position between young childhood and young adulthood. 

It’s a simple formula. Boy meets girl (or, more often, girl meets boy. Or, less frequently, boy meets boy or girl meets girl). Boy and girl fall in love. One loses the other, or some other conflict arises. Then comes the happy ending. This plot, or some variation of it, is one we’ve read over and over again.

In the introduction to Worlds of Childhood: The Art and Craft of Writing for Children (1990), William Zinsser wrote, “This gift — to get good language into the ear of children at a very early age — is what children’s literature has in its power to bestow…to write well it is necessary to grow up hearing how other people have written well: to get into one’s metabolism the grandeur, the playfulness, and the narrative strength of the English language.” But from my observation, fewer and fewer children are being read to these days.