The Chicago network of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) emailed me late last year to see if I’d do a program for their January 11, 2014 meeting on how to build a platform. “Your name came up as a possible speaker on this topic,” the message said, “because you are someone who, […]

My great-niece Floey turns eight years old tomorrow, and gee whiz, what a coincidence that this extremely flattering email arrived in my in box just when I was thinking about what to get for her for her birthday – she wrote it as a report for her second grade class: Beth Finke unfortunaly is my […]

Kate Hannigan Issa’s The Good Fun! book and my Safe & Sound book were both illustrated by the talented Anthony Alex Letourneau and published by the fabulous Blue Marlin Publications. Kate lives in Chicago, too, and while waiting for Disney-Hyperion to publish her second book this May she squeezes in time to promote other authors on her “Author of” […]

Remember my post about Vision Forward, the conference about educating kids who are blind? I signed more Braille copies of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound at that conference than print ones, and this thank-you note from the mom of a five-year-old boy I met there was so moving that I wrote her back to […]

My friend Nicole Dotto and I both volunteer for Sit Stay Read (SSR), a literacy organization that encourages Chicago Public School kids to love to read. SSR uses dogs and volunteers in all sorts of clever ways: children read aloud to specially trained therapy dogs, human volunteers visit as “book buddies” to help individual kids, […]