National Book Festival Announces Youth Authors

The poster art for this year's festival was
designed by Dana Tanamachi.

The virtual National Book Festival is coming up fast! Scheduled for Sept 17-26, the Festival will be available online and through on-demand videos with content archived for access after the Festival.

The youth book creator line-up includes:

"Children’s authors and their featured books are:

• Derrick Barnes, “I Am Every Good Thing”
• Kacen Callender, “King and the Dragonflies”
• Kate DiCamillo and Sophie Blackall, “The Beatryce Prophecy”
• Rep. Sharice Davids of Kansas, “Sharice’s Big Voice: A Native Kid Becomes a Congresswoman”
• Nikki Grimes, “Legacy: Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance”
• Dan Gutman, “Houdini and Me”
• Brayden Harrington, “Brayden Speaks Up: How One Boy Inspired the Nation”
• Ann Clare LeZotte, “Show Me a Sign”
• Meg Medina, “Merci Suárez Can’t Dance”
• Lupita Nyong’o, “Sulwe”
• Jerry Pinkney, “The Little Mermaid”
• Guy Raz and Mindy Thomas, “Wow in the World: The How and Wow of the Human Body: From Your Tongue to Your Toes and All the Guts in Between”
• Ali Stroker and Stacy Davidowitz, “The Chance to Fly”

Children’s authors participating in live Q&A sessions are: Derrick Barnes, Rep. Sharice Davids, Dan Gutman, Jerry Pinkney and Mindy Thomas. Teen authors doing live Q&A sessions are: Traci Chee, Tahereh Mafi, Kekla Magoon, Trung Le Nguyen and Jason Reynolds.

Select children’s videos, featuring Kate DiCamillo and Sophie Blackall, Ann Clare LeZotte, Meg Medina, Guy Raz and Mindy Thomas, will include short vignettes related to the featured books that demonstrate activities for families to do together using Library’s collections.

Teens authors and their featured books include:

• Traci Chee, “We Are Not Free”
• Jay Coles, “Things We Couldn’t Say”
• Sharon G. Flake, “The Life I’m In”
• Tahereh Mafi, “An Emotion of Great Delight”
• Kekla Magoon, “Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party’s Promise to the People”
• Trung Le Nguyen, “The Magic Fish”
• Jason Reynolds, “Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks”
• Angie Thomas, “Concrete Rose”
• Katie Zhao, “How We Fall Apart”
• Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam, “Punching the Air”

Stop here to read more details from the festival's Sept 10 blog post and here to see a detailed schedule.

Library of Congress Book Festival, 52 Great Reads and Other Book Lists

Library of Congress - pixabay

The Library of Congress holds the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. each September since 2001. This annual literary event is a librarian's dream bringing together authors, readers, and book fans for all kinds activities, including family-friendly ones. To learn more about the festival, click HERE. To find out how to host your own book festival, click HERE.

One of the resources put together and distributed at the festival is 52 Great Reads, a list of books representing the 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia and the US Virgin Islands. Links for the 2016 book list and others going back to 2012 are available HERE.

When looking for award winners, one can never have enough places to find comprehensive lists of all of them. Well, the Library of Congress has put one together for us to which even includes a database covering the criteria of the awards, when they are announced and other helpful information. You can find all of those links HERE.