Dear friends:

While you are awaiting — I hope you are awaiting — the March/April issue of the Horn Book, we here are busily entrenched in preparing May/June, our annual Special Issue, this time devoted to the 25th anniversary of the Pura Belpré Award, established by ALA and REFORMA in 1996 to honor a “Latino/Latina writer and illustrator whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children and youth.” To that end, we’ve asked many recipients of the Belpré Award to contribute something to the issue, and what a panoply of riches it is. Sometimes editing can really give you what you need: I’ve been working on what we call the “short pieces,” where we ask a clutch of authors and illustrators to respond to a single broad prompt, in this issue’s case, a call to reflect on a moment in youth when they each realized that the creative life would be for them. These stories are so great, and to see again and again what sparks a young person to realize that they could be a writer or illustrator is downright inspirational. The only spoiler I’ll drop here is to tell you teachers that your work reaches farther and deeper than you may ever know. Subscribe today!

On hbook.com, Viktor and Nadya fight the Nazis, Frank Morrison talks about Mannerism and basketball, and Marmee gets pissed off. (Is anyone watching Dickinson? I’m of several minds about it, but I did enjoy the cheerfully foulmouthed* Louisa May Alcott crashing the Dickinsons’ Christmas dinner.) And in Horn Book news, I’m very pleased to tell you that Cindy Ritter and Shoshana Flax have both been promoted, Cindy to Managing Editor and Shoshana to Associate Editor. They are increasingly indispensable, and I’m happy to have this opportunity to reward their hard work through this difficult year.

My recreational reading has taken an unexpected detour after my writer/classical music text-pal Bruce Brooks recommended The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer, which had been recommended to Bruce by his wife, Chronicle’s Ginee Seo. I guess I thought Heyer was going to be Jane Austen-lite, but The Grand Sophy is distinctly its own and I’m loving it. And now Bruce and I have formed our own Old Men Reading Club to climb Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain together. I have a feeling my Swiss train videos are going to be getting a lot of screen time.

Love,

Roger

*“Hawthorne can eat a dick, am I right?”