FOR READERS

A sign at the Concord State Prison’s Family Connections Center reads , “Be a dad. Be there.” This is a story about books as a link between kids and their parent who’s incarcerated.

Food has a way of bringing people together. These picture books explore food, friendship, family and the traditions that travel with us across cultures.

Stories can take us across borders and into lives very different from our own. These five outstanding international books offer young readers new places, perspectives and voices — and remind us of the connections that bring us together.

A book for a young child is the world. It becomes part of the way a child learns to see and make meaning for the first time. Writing a picture book means bringing words and images together to create that world, with every word carrying weight and every image opening another possibility.

I had the great privilege of studying with the British Carnegie Medal winner, Jan Mark. Here’s an appreciation of the craft, and large-heartedness of this extraordinary children’s novelist. Every day I wish I could talk with her again.

Julie Flett’s picture book “Birdsong” runs away with my blue ribbon for picture books about moving. All of these books are about migration of some kind, and in Katherena's case, in “Birdsong,” her migration is to a new home, away from the sea.

Soksreinith Ten (call her Nith, she told me) , a reporter with Voice of America interviewed me for their English and Khmer News Service about Either the Beginning or the End of the World. She asked, in a few words tell me what your novel is about.

Reflections on fellow author Elsa Marston and her literary love affair with Lebanon and the Middle East. Elsa’s stories explored war, cultural difference, and the possibility of peace. In “The Olive Tree,” she searched for “some signs of hope” among people trying to move beyond hatred and anger. Fiction can help us understand the world—and tell its deepest truths.

For fourteen years, America had been mired in war, creating a cultural gulf between military and civilian communities. Through New Hampshire Humanities’ “Soldiers Home and Away” project, “Either the Beginning or the End of the World” became part of a conversation about soldiers coming home, traumatic brain injury, families, and understanding.

The war still belongs to me, as it belongs to everyone else it touched. When I became a children’s librarian, I started watching how writers approached the war in children’s and young adult books.