My article was first opublished by The Pirate Tree: Social Justice and Children’s Literature
The group Reforma, an American Library Association affiliate, and IBBY, the International Board of Books for Young People, have, at their core, the driving belief that every child has the right to read. READ MORE
This photo captures an event that happened on a fall night in Kittery, Maine. It has already become one of my all-time favorite events. The people gathered with me are my neighbors who came to hear me read from Either the Beginning or the End of the World at the Rice Library. I met a family for the first time, and they had adopted their Cambodian daughter. Now their daughter READ MORE
New U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, son of migrant workers, writes often about his child self and writes poems for children and teens. In his preface to Laughing Out Loud, I Fly, he writes that when he was seventeen years old he discovered Picasso’s book of poems, Hunk of Skin and says he was “bathed in sunlight.” He said he was inspired by “Picasso’s love of seeing and hearing things differently.” And he sat at this brother-in-law’s table in San Jose and wrote this book. Here are a few lines from “Went to the Marketplace & I Bought Beautifuls”
This is a bittersweet fishing story. This morning as I write, fisherman Mike Pawluk is steaming toward Montauk on the Kirsten Lee, a boat he went ground fishing on for about fourteen years. He fished with Captain Steve Lee and they were friends and still are. They’d been through changing fishing regulations together, documenting days at sea, to the quotas and catch share plans. Shrimping closed a few years ago. Mike says the fish weren’t there. The Gulf of Maine was warming. And it was hard not to pull up cod READ MORE
The Lowell Southeast Asian Water Festival, formerly Riverfest, happens every August on the Merrimack River in Lowell, Massachusetts. There’s everything Cambodia. Music, dance, ginger trees to buy, golden bracelets, river boats, lime papaya salad. I went with our family friend who is also a photographer, Ty Paterson, and she took these photos at the last celebration. She is also an interpreter of the Cambodian culture for me. READ MORE