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My connection with the Horn Book dates back to the regime of Ethel and Paul Heins. Perhaps because I was so young at the time, it seemed like the Red Sea parted whenever they arrived — always together, inseparable — at any children’s book gathering. Though they were small, tweedy,...
How did I end up in the picture-book world? It was all because of Nicole Rubel, the brilliant illustrator of the Rotten Ralph books, among many others. I was a creative writing student at Emerson College, and I was still on parole after an unsuccessful attempt to smuggle a ton...
A picture book is a dance that begins with a solitary dancer, whose success depends on sharing the stage with future partners. In truth, it is a company of dancers: author and illustrator, editor, designer, and art director. And only together will the dance flourish. But as Patrick Swayze famously...
Early on the morning of August 1, 2022, I joined a group of hikers at the gates of what was once the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, and we set off on a six-day, 140-kilometer trek across southern Poland. Within a couple of hours, it became clear that I was in for...
When I started at the Horn Book at the beginning of our current century, I apprenticed myself to a man who was in no rush to let go of the previous one. Born in 1917, a printer who was the son of a printer and the father of another, Thomas...
Duncan in third grade. Photo courtesy of Alice Faye Duncan. When I consider my thirty years writing picture books and poetry that honor Black achievement, I know that the template for this life began in 1975 while I read crisp new library books about Harriet, Rosa, and Martin. I know...
The author, in red sweater, in the Horn Book office circa 2012. Photo: Cynthia K. Ritter from her March/April 2012 Horn Book Magazine article "When the Name of the Game Is a Children's Book." I hated school as a child. I always earned good grades, but classrooms were like hell...
In improv comedy there is a hard and fast rule: whatever your scene partner asks you to do, no matter how ridiculous or outrageous, you always answer, “Yes, and…” Saying no ends the scene and cuts off all possibilities. Saying yes continues the scene and provides infinite opportunities. It’s a...
The Horn Book is 100! Hoorah and Hooray! To celebrate I’ll poe out a poem! If I can think what to say… After my uninspiring, hum-drummish day. I woke feeling “blah,” For the sky, it was gray. And I tread the same boring path, In the same boring way. Is...
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