It was my pleasure to interview The Pirate Tree reviewer Varian Johnson about his new book The Great Green Heist. One of the misconceptions that people have about The Pirate Tree is that we write reviews of “issue” books but,…
Author: J.L. Powers
J.L. Powers is the author of the y.a. novels This Thing Called the Future and The Confessional, and editor the forthcoming anthology That Mad Game: Growing Up in a Warzone.
The Transcriber by Kristen Witucki
In the short novel The Transcriber by Kristen Witucki, published by Gemma Media, the protagonist Louis makes short work of society’s understanding of disability as he analyzes the way the world treats his blind sister Emily. The book is an…
Loss, survival, and hard-won truths in Pandemic by Yvonne Ventresca
Apocalyptic scenarios are favorites for teens. Many times, the apocalyptic scenarios take us severely out of the world of reality and into a fantastical world of flesh-eating zombies. Not that there’s anything wrong with that scenario! By contrast, however, the…
Attention illustrators: you can help raise money to fund a library in Ethiopia
Last week, I attended a dinner fundraiser for the non-profit Ethiopia Reads, which was honoring children’s writer Jane Kurtz (also a co-founder of the non-profit). I met the most amazing 11 year old there, who is single-handedly (with his mother’s…
Anna Was Here, asking the hard questions of life
I recently read Anna Was Here by Jane Kurtz. Anna is the young daughter of a minister, growing up in Colorado, when her father decides to move his family to Kansas in order to help his home church through a…
Walking through Guatemala’s War with Caminar author Skila Brown
When I was a kid, I devoured books about World War II and the Civil War. These weren’t the only wars that meant anything to me, but they were the only wars written about by children’s authors. In my personal…
Masks, Freedom, and Identity: an interview with the author of The Princess in the Opal Mask
I was so in love with The Princess in the Opal Mask by Jenny Lundquist that I just had to talk to her. The novel is set in an imaginary kingdom with two young girls, one who doesn’t know who…
Defy: quiet and subtle lashings of feminist thought
Defy, a debut novel by Sara B. Larson, is a swashbuckling adventure tale about a girl-pretending-to-be-a-boy in order to save herself from the terrible fate that awaits her when she’s captured during a raid on her village. Her father and…
Writing Crossing Cultural Borders-An Introduction to a new blog series
This week’s guest post comes to us via Emily Jiang. Emily Jiang is a poet, writer, & composer. She is the author of Summoning the Phoenix, illustrated by April Chu, and published by Shen’s Books, an imprint of Lee &…
Madiba, hamba kahle kwezulu….Nelson Mandela, rest in peace.
Madiba, hamba kahle kwezulu–the translation is “Nelson Mandela, travel safely to heaven.” I wanted to take a minute to pay tribute to South Africa’s most famous fighter against injustice and racism, Nelson Mandela, who died yesterday after a long bout…