At ALA Annual in Washington D.C. – Day 4

In the spirit of student creativity, I, former King student Kayla Cogle, will be doing the blogging tonight. It’s 12:17 AM. Whoo hoo! Well, it’s actually more like a ‘nughhhhhh….’. But there’s definitely some supressed enthusiasm going on there.

We kicked off the morning with a Young Adult Author Breakfast. ‘Breakfast’ being the questionable word in the title. Expecting eggs, toast, and the like, we struck out from the hotel without eating the breakfast the hotel provides. What was actually served at the event was a martini glass filled with small pieces of fruit. This was added to by a basket of dainty croissants, which was passed around our round table, one of about 45 in the room.
Also passed around the room were several well known young adult authors. They got about five minutes at each table as the circled through the room. We met: M.T. Anderson, Chris Crutcher, Walter Dean Meyers, Allan Stratton, Garrett Freyman-Weir, Gary Schmidtt, and Marilyn Nelson, who wrote ‘A Wreath for Emmett Till’. We were also joined by some publishing reps from Candlewick Press.

After that it was off to the exhibit halls, where we filled our wheelie suitcases with books. Some of you will be pleased to know that we managed to get a copy of the next book in the ‘Bloody Jack’ series. You can also be expecting new works from Nancy Farmer, Meg Cabot, Herbie Brennen, Charles de Lint, and the amusingly named Pseudonymous Bosch. You can politely pester Mrs. McDaniels about reading them, but please kindly do not mention that it was I who told you to do so.

At 4:00, Otrell went to hear Judy Bloom speak. He also tried to get one of her books signed, but alas, the line was far too long. By this time we were starving due to our lack of proper breakfast, so made our way to a cafe and then home. We spent the rest of the afternoon in book filled bliss.

‘Till later,
Kayla

At ALA Annual in Washington D.C. – Day 3

Hello everyone, Otrell L. I. McDaniel here. In case you’re wondering why I’m doing the blog today and not Kelley, today she got a little exasperated with us and how much of the blogging she had been doing. She originally wanted Tess and Kayla to do the blog instead, but I volunteered in their place. Now onto today’s story….

Today we got up very early (5:30 AM) and met with Cynthia Lord, author of Rules (Scholastic, 2006), a book about Katherine, a teenage girl, living life with David, her autistic brother, and Jason, a disabled, mute friend of hers. A book we (Tess and Kayla and I) had recently read. We had breakfast at a Starbucks near our hotel.

After breakfast, we went straight to the exhibit hall, splitting up into pairs (Kelley and I and Tess and Kayla). Kelley and I managed a sweep of three-four rows of exhibits, getting signed books and photographs with Jeff Kinney, author of Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Amulet Books, 2007)

and Walter Dean Myers, author of Autobiography of My Dead Brother (HarperCollins, 2005)

while Tess and Kayla zoomed through apparently the entire hall, managing to fill up each of their empty suitcases before we left the exhibit hall for a luncheon to celebrate author Lois Lowry’s new Margaret A. Edwards Award for The Giver (Houghton Mifflin, 1993), where we were served lunch and were given free copies of The Giver.

After the ceremony, we were given a free hour before we left to escort our prizes back to our hotel, which we used to interrogate the comics section of the hall. We captured many rare books, as well as learning very sadly, that the fifth Unshelved collection was not yet available for sale, only for preorder. We soon ran out of time for the exhibits, and left to cart our treasured haul home.

Barely after returning to the hotel, we left for Mitali Perkins’s book launch party for First Daughter: Extreme American Makeover (Penguin, 2007).

On the way back we chose to split up; Kayla, Tess and I returned home to rest, while Kelley chose to go back to the conference, also telling us for the first time today that we were on our own for dinner. We survived long enough for Kelley to return home though, and so endeth another exciting day for our group in Washington.

At ALA Annual in Washington D.C. – Day 2

We had a fabulous day here in D.C.. We all slept long and well.

Our hotel serves an extended continental breakfast, and, although I modeled good balanced eating habits (e.g. hard-boiled egg, toast with peanut butter, oatmeal and fresh fruit), I’m afraid that my charges are unimpressed and insist on beginning the day with a lot of starches and carbohydrates (pastries and cereal). They will probably insist on my reporting that they did each have one segment of my orange. I told them that 5-9 fruits a day doesn’t mean 5-9 bites.

Our morning was taken up with a special presentation about resources available through the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. We saw a few of the new acquisitions from the photo archives and learned about how they catalog photos as well as new acquisitions from the video archives and how those are catalogued and many of them digitized and accessible via the USHMM website. We watched one video of anti-Semitic Nazi propoganda that, although it was all in German, its insidious message was clear and needed no translation. We learned about the museum’s registry of Holocaust survivors and also about the Shoah Foundation’s database of oral histories.

Then we heard from Charlene Schiff, a survivor from Poland, tell her extraordinary story about being orphaned and left to fend for herself in the forests of Poland when she was 11-14 years old. Mrs. Schiff told us that there were 5,000 Jews in her small Polish town, but at the end of the war, there were only two survivors: she and a childhood friend.

She said, “I do not know why I survived. … I feel imprisoned by my memories and my past. … But I must bear witness. … I stand here in witness. … I speak for each one of them. I cannot allow the world to forget.”

Mrs. Schiff said that she loves traveling and telling her story, especially to young people in schools. She said that she warns young people of the four I’s:
Indifference
Ignorance
Intolerance
Injustice
She said that young people are our hope for the future and that she will meet with them and talk with them as long as she is able to do so. We invited her to come to Maine.

An Inspiring Speaker and Our New Friend: Mrs. Charlene Schiff …

The USHMM is on the corner of 14th Street and Independence Ave, right around the corner from The Mall (not a mall, The Mall…). After lunch, Tess and Kayla wandered around The Mall and got lots of pictures of interesting buildings, and, of course, they checked out the local book shops and made some purchases.

Otrell and I hung out some more in the USHMM and checked out the museum shop, where we spent a chunk of money on books as well. One of the books we got was Ruth Minsky Sender’s Holocaust memoir, The Cage (Simon & Schuster, 1986).

Below is a picture of Otrell with Ruth Minsky Sender and her adult son …

The Washington Monument, located on The Mall, is encircled by 50 U.S. flags.

TRIVIA QUESTION: What do the 50 flags surrounding the Washington Monument represent?

Best wishes,
Ms McDaniel et al.

At ALA Annual in Washington D.C. – Day 1

After a long night of travel, we did, finally arrive in Washington, D.C.

When we went to the Conference registration, a funny thing happened. Kayla was given her registration materials, a fancy badge holder and a large conference bag (with the conference logo). Tess and Otrell were told that, because they were not ALA members, they would only receive a simple badge holder and no bag. I asked Kayla if she was an ALA member and she assured me that she was not. She kept the bag and fancy badge holder anyway.

Tess and Kayla spent the early part of the afternoon pouring over the list of author signings:
“Gregory Maguire!”
“Oh my God! Holly Black! You hafta let us stay up to see Holly Black!”
“Annette Curtis Klause! We can’t miss her!”

I’ll let them share their list of “Authors I want to meet…”

I gave a talk at the Intellectual Freedom Round Table Pre-Conference, Celebrating the Library Bill of Rights. It went very well. I met a bunch of new people and I was invited to serve on an ALA-IFRT committee.

Another funny thing happened to the young people. A woman who was attending the IRFT Pre-Conference came over to Kayla, patted her on the shoulder and enthusiastically inquired, “How are you!” while grinning ear to ear. She also patted Tess and Otrell and, again smiling broadly greeted them animatedly. Kayla, Tess and Otrell greeted the woman in return. Kayla obsessed for the rest of the afternoon, “Who was that woman? Do I know her?” I think that the woman was simply excited to see young people in attendance. I wonder what else is going to happen …

We finally checked into our hotel room, which was a bit of a disappointment, but we’ll make do.

I had to wake everyone up to eat dinner. We were an exhausted crew!

Alisa Libby, author of The Blood Confession, at the Portland Public Library

A couple of seventh grade students and I went to the Portland Public Library today to the First Friday Children’s & Young Adult Author Lunch to meet author Alisa Libby and hear her talk about her new book, The Blood Confession, a gothic young adult novel about a 16th century Hungarian noblewoman who begins a bloody quest looking for the secret to eternal youth and beauty. The novel is a fictionalized horror story inspired by the legend of Erzsebet Bathory, known as The Blood Countess.

Alisa has been writing since she was a very young child and one piece of advice to aspiring writers she offers is, “[R]ead as much as [you] can because reading is the best way to become a writer.” (Thank you for that sentiment, Alisa!)

Alisa said that the historical figure, Erzsebet Bathory, has been with her since she read a story about her in a collection of vampire stories she found in her own local public library when she was a teenager. Alisa has been using her as a character in her writing for years. (What a creepy companion to have for all those years!)

In addition to talking about herself, her writing process and getting published, Alisa read a very compelling scene from her book, where the Countess Erzebet Bizecka is bleeding one of her young servant girls.

The bleeding seemed to take longer than I had expected, and I implored Anastasia for patience as I paced the floor again agitated. Anastasia did not seem at all impatient, sitting drowsily hunched over the bowl. According to medical texts, humans were equipped with pound upon pound of blood–surely there was still enough inside of her that could be spared. I glanced again at the measly pool and sighed.

“We may have to try again,” I told her, inspecting the cut upon her arm. “Perhaps a cut upon your leg–that might yield more.” When I turned to look at the girl in the chair, I jumped back at the sight. Her head had fallen forward onto the table.

- The Blood Confession by Alisa Libby, p. 215

It was chilling. And yet, also, strangely compelling.

To add to the gruesomeness, the book itself looks like it’s been stained with blood … EEEEWW …

Check out Alisa Libby’s website http://www.alisalibby.com.

Considering our horror fans, who love

Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
• In the Forests of the Night
• Demon In My View
• Shattered Mirror
• Midnight Predator
Melissa de la Cruz
• Blue Bloods
• Masquerade
Annette Curtis Klaus
• Blood and Chocolate
• The Silver Kiss
• Freaks
Scott Westerfeld
• Peeps
• The Last Days

I think that this book will be a great addition to our horror section.

So it’s fortunate, for you horror fans, that we bought three copies and had them autographed to the students at King Middle School.

Enjoy.

Ms McDaniel

Portland, OR, Day 5

Today was the day I dedicated to my daughter by exploring the world of Beverly Cleary. My daughter is a BIG Ramona Quimby fan.

Here’s what we did on the final day of our trip:

We went to what would have been Ramona’s local public library – in Ramona’s world, it was the Glenwood Library, but in Beverly Cleary’s real world, it is called the Hollywood Branch of the Multnomah County Library.

There is wall-sized map of Beverly Cleary’s neighorhood, which is the neighborhood that she writes about in her stories.

The children’s librarian gave us a map to take with us.

Our first stop was the Grant Park, where we explored the Beverly Cleary Sculpture Garden. This is the statue of Ramona.

This is Henry Huggins, Beverly Cleary’s first character.

And this is Henry’s dog Risby.

And this is the real Klickitat Street, where Ramona Quimby lived, on the corner of 28th Ave and Klickitat.

All in all, a great way to end our trip.

Did I mention that our room at the Bed and Breakfast made us feel like we were in a mansion? Well, check out these pictures …

A very long day of travel tomorrow. I look forward to seeing you all again, on Thursday (1/25/07). I’ve missed you.

Ms McDaniel

Seattle,WA and Portland, OR, Day 4

Seattle, Day 4

First, the ALA Awards …

The are numerous awards given by various divisions of the American Library Association; the most famous awards are the Newbery Medal, given to the most distinguished American book for children (ages 9-12), and the Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished American picture book. But there are other awards as well:

From the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA):
• Printz Award for the best young adult (ages 12-18) book published in English
• Margaret Edwards Award for Lifetime Achievement of a young adult author

From the Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT):
• Coretta Scott King Awards, for the best book for young people written by an African American, the best picture book illustrated by an African American
• Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Award for the best first time African American author

From the Association of Library Service to Children (ALSC), in addition to the Caldecott and Newbery,:
• Bachelder Award, for the best book for young people, translated from another language into English
• Theodore Seuss Geisel Award for the most distinguished beginning reader
• Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for someone who has made a lasting contribution to literature for children
• Schneider Family Book Award for the best artistic expression of young people with disabilities
• Sibert Medal, for the best nonfiction book for young people

I have only read a few of this year’s award winners, so far. I don’t always agree with the various award committees that the winning books were the “best” or “most distinguished” in their categories. But we’ll buy them, and read them, and decide for ourselves.

One thing that I am very excited about is the fact that this year’s Printz Medal went to a graphic novel, American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang

We did have the chance to visit the Seattle Public Library, another interesting building, made mostly of glass panels. It is ten stories high. It has lime green elevators and escalators. Lime green!? Whose idea was that?!

Our final visit to the exhibit hall was another great boon for us. We shipped our third box of books back to Portland, ME via the post office in the exhibit hall.

The final author that I had the pleasure of meeting was Zlata Filipovic, the author of Zlata’s Diary, which is about her life and experiences in the Balkan War. She has a new book out that she edited; it’s called Stolen Voices: Young People’s War Diaries from World War I to Irag. The publisher, Penguin Books, was giving away copies, so I got two and had them autographed. I asked Zlata (left) if I could take her picture while she autographed them. She agreed.

We were only in Seattle for the first half of the day. Then we packed up all our stuff and headed to King’s Station to take the Amtrak Cascade train to Portland, OR …

Portland, OR

Our train ride was uneventful, but very comfortable. We rented a DigEPlayer for Aedin to amuse herself with during the four hour train ride. The device is like a portable DVD player, except that it has twelve movies and a series of TV and cartoon episodes on it. The really cool thing is that you can rent it at one Amtrak station and drop it off at another one. It only cost $11 and we got to keep the headphones. (I think I now have enough headphones for all the library computers.)

The Bed and Breakfast where we are staying is so beautiful! It is called, Portland’s White House – I think because it has a strong resemblance to a certain home located at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, in Washington, D.C. …

We feel like we’re staying in a mansion …

Tomorrow is our last full day. On Wednesday, we fly home, from Portland, OR to Portland, ME.

Check back for my final Seattle/Portland blog.

Ms McDaniel

Seattle, Day 3, Part 2

Our second visit to the exhibit hall was interrupted by an Unfortunate Event: my daughter lost her conference badge. I’m ashamed to admit that I was not very gracious and instead of reassuring her that “everything will be okay,” I got angry and made her cry. (For the record, I did apologize.) The good news is that the ALA conference folks were very gracious and printed her out a new badge. But the whole thing did put a dent in our exhibit hall time.

I wanted to take the opportunity to demonstrate how I choose books. The process is (surprisingly) similar to the “How to Choose a Good Book for Yourself” activity that we just did with Windsor 7.

I judge books by their covers. Here are a couple of books that I chose simply based on the cover art:

Here are some that I chose just because the titles sounded interesting:

Thou Shalt Not Kill Unless Otherwise Instructed: Poems and Stories by Mike Sharpe

Speed Show: How Nascar Won the Heart of America by Dave Caldwell

James Houston’s Treasury of Inuit Legends: Stories and Drawings by James Houston

These are books that I chose because I recognized (and liked) the authors:

If a Tree Falls at Lunch Period by Gennifer Choldenko (Notes from a Liar and Her Dog and Al Capone Does My Shirts)

The Breakup Bible: A Novel by Melissa Kantor (Confessions of a Not It Girl)

Rickshaw Girl by Mitali Perkins (Monsoon Summer and The Not-so-Star-Spangled Life of Sunita Sen)

The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt (Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy)

These are books that I chose because I saw something on the cover that let me know that they were graphic novels, which I LOVE:

The Plain Janes by Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg

Houdini: The Handcuff King by Jason Lutes & Nick Bertozzi

Stuck in the Middle: Seventeen Comics from an Unpleasant Age edited by Ariel Schrag

These are books that looked a little interesting, so I picked each one up, read the blurb on the back, flipped through it, and then asked the person selling it to “tell me more.” After learning a bit more about each book, I was definitely interested:

Evil Genius by Catherine Jinks “Cadel Piggott has a genius IQ and a fascination with systems of all kinds. At seven he was illegally hacking into computers, and now at fourteen, he’s studying for his World Domination degree at the Axis Institute founded by criminal mastermind Dr. Phineas Darkkon.” – from back cover

Piratepedia “This time travel manual will transport you to the world’s most dangerous seas, where you’ll fight in the bloodiest battles with history’s cruelest cutthroats, from Egyptian Sea People to Blackbeard to pirates of today.” – from the back cover

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick “With 284 pages of original drawings and combining elements of picture book, graphic novel, and film, Brian Selznick breaks open the novel form to create an entirely new reading experience.” – from the back cover

All the books that I have talked about so far, are still only just a small sample of what I have picked up here at the conference! I can’t wait to get back and share them all with you!

This evening, I had the wonderful opportunity to hear a talk from Chris Crutcher, one of the most challenged and banned authors in the United States. He is both an author and an adolescent and family therapist. Many of the characters in his books were inspired by young people he has met through his practice as an adolescent therapist. His books are very gritty and contain a lot of rough language – one the reasons they are frequently challenged and banned. He said to us, in defense of the “language” he uses in his books, “I have to tell the stories in their native tongues. … If you censor that voice, you censor that kid. … If you ban that book, you ban that kid. … If we don’t want to hear about it because we don’t like the way it’s said. Well, that’s just crazy.”

He was an awesome speaker! He’s another one that we have just got to bring to Maine!

After his talk, he stayed for more than an hour and autographed books. I bought – and got autographed for YOU – Athletic Shorts: Six Short Stories, King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography, The Sledding Hill, and Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes.

The awards will be announced tomorrow. Stay tuned…

Ms McDaniel

Seattle, Day 3, Part 1

I had a meeting this morning with school librarians representing every state in the United States. The meeting is called the American Association of School Libraries (AASL) Affiliate Assembly and there are two representatives from each state library association.

QUESTION: Two representatives from each state is like which part of Congress, the House of Representatives or the Senate?

After the meeting, which lasted two hours, by the way, my daughter and I walked around the exhibit hall we didn’t get to visit yesterday. But we didn’t even go down half of the aisles before we were so bogged down with “stuff” that we had to come back to our hotel room to make a drop!

Here’s some of the more than 3 dozen Advance Reading Copies (ARCs) of new books that are going to be coming out this spring and summer that I picked up:
• Five Ancestors Book 4: The Crane by Jeff Stone;
• a new novel by Laurie Halse Anderson, Twisted;
• a new book by Walter Dean Myers about a boy coming-of-age in 1920s Harlem, Harlem Summer;
• Masquerade, the second book in the Blue Bloods (vampire) series by Melissa de la Cruz;
• an upcoming New York Times book, Hurricane Force Winds: In the Path of America’s Deadliest Storms;
• a new graphic novel by the author of Boy Proof, Cecil Castellucci, The Plain Janes;
• the first book in a new series by Mates and Dates and Truth, Dare, Kiss or Promise author Cathy Hopkins, Zodiac Girls;
• Sharon Flake’s upcoming book, The Broken Bike Boy and the Queen of 33rd Street;
• I LOVED the title of this humorous-looking book: Do the Math: Secrets, Lies and Algebra by Wendy Lichtman

And we still have more than half of one exhibit hall still to go!

Stay tuned …

Ms McDaniel

Seattle, Day 2, Part 2

At the American Library Association’s (ALA’s) Midwinter Meeting exhibit hall, there are thousands of exhibitors. The exhibits are spread out across two exhibit halls. My daughter Aedin and I went through one of the exhibit halls today.

Here are some of the special things we saw and did:

Terry Trueman, the author of Stuck in Neutral, gave a talk at the Library of Congress booth as part of LC’s Lifelong Literacy Initiative. He was such a great and incredibly funny speaker. He is an author I would absolutely LOVE to bring to Maine. I bought three copies of Stuck in Neutral and two copies of his new book, No Right Turn. Then I got them all autographed! I got one copy of Stuck in Neutral autographed for Mrs. MacDonald, because she brought all of her W6 Language Arts classes down to the library for booktalks and Stuck in Neutral was one of the books that we did.

This is a picture of my daughter with Terry Trueman.

One of the new technologies that I was excited to try out was the Playaway. It is like an ipod, but it is a single digital audiobook. In this picture you can see me plugged in and listening to Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Rising. The company was also giving away “ear candy”, i.e. earphones. My daughter and I each took a pair.

Both my daughter and I were excited to learn that Jimmy Gownley, the author/illustrator of the Amelia Rules! comics was also here. So we bought copies of his two new collections and had them autographed to you, the students at King Middle School.

One of the exhibitors was a company that specializes in publishing materials about notable African Americans. As part of the promotion, this famous African American was standing near their booth. Do you know who he is?

HINT: He was a very famous abolitionist.
HINT 2: He wrote and published his autobiography, which was titled, A Narrative of the Life of …
HINT 3: He published an anti-Slavery newspaper called, The North Star.

I’ll check in tomorrow.

I wonder what we’ll discover when we visit the other exhibit hall …

Ms McDaniel