What inspired Jade’s story? I wanted to tell a story that explored the intersections of race, class, and gender. Jade is a little bit of me, a little bit of the girls I met when I worked as a mentor, and a lot of my imagination. I also wanted to set her in Portland, Oregon, where I grew up. The …
Interview with Suzanne Selfors
How did you come up with the idea of a superhero dog and an evil genius guinea pig? This book came about in a different way than any of my other books. I’d been working with an editor at Harper Collins named Melissa Miller on an IP project and she shared an idea with me. She’d come up with these …
Interview with Alan Gratz
Was Refugee always set up as three person narrative? Were their stories always connected? Refugee began for me with the story of the MS St. Louis. For those who haven’t read Refugee yet, the St. Louis was a passenger ship that left Nazi Germany in 1939 with more than 900 Jewish refugees on board, bound for Cuba. The St. Louis didn’t end up …
Interview with Ammi-Joan Paquette and Laurie Thompson
This book is all about solid researching techniques. Where did you start digging once you had the idea for the book? Or did plans for a series come partway through the research phase? Joan: The idea for this book first sprang out of the abundance of exciting and unbelievable true stories that we saw around us in the news and …
Interview with Elisha Cooper
What sparked the idea for the book? Do you have cats? About five years ago we got our daughters two kittens. A year later, one of the cats died. My daughters were devastated. I was too, of course, but having grown up on a farm with lots of animals, I think I was more familiar with life and death. That …
Interview with Caroline Arnold
Do you have plans to keep chickens after learning about their care along with Room 6? A number of years ago, before I moved to Los Angeles, I lived in the country with my family and we kept a flock of chickens. Watching the children in Room 6 care for their chickens reminded me of this experience. Now that I …
Interview with Julie Kim
What was the inspiration for Where’s Halmoni? My inspiration was mainly my children. I wanted to give them something that mirrored their experience of being part of two cultures, old and new, and both familiar and unfamiliar. In what ways does Where’s Halmoni reflect your own life? After I finished making this book, I realized that I had encapsulated my own experience of …
Interview with Stephanie Burgis
Dragons and chocolate seem like an odd combination. How did you come up with the idea? Dragons and chocolate are two of my very favorite things in the world, so I just loved the idea of mixing them together! And of course it gave me a fabulous excuse to make myself a rich, strong dark hot chocolate EVERY DAY for …
Interview with Neal Shusterman
Congrats! We’d love to know: how did you come up with the idea for Scythe? After many years teen dystopia, I wanted to do something that flipped it upside down. Rather than a tale of a dystopian world, I thought “What would be the consequences of a truly perfect world?” A world without war, poverty, crime, or disease. A world …
The 2017 Cybils Winners
There’s really not much to say, here at the announcement of the winners, except a HUGE Thank You (!) to all our volunteers: chairs, panelists, and judges. We could NOT have done it without you! Board Books Changing Faces: Meet Happy Bear by Nathan Thoms, illustrated by Carles Ballesteros Harry N Abrams Nominated by: Charlotte Learning about facial expressions and …