The excitement is building for the Asian Festival of Children’s Content being held May 25 – 30 in Singapore. PaperTigers is proud sponsor of the AFCC, an annual event that brings together content creators and producers with parents, teachers, librarians and anyone interested in quality Asian content for children around the world. This year’s conference will have an added emphasis on young adult literature and children’s works in translation and will be featuring Malaysia as the country of focus. Two years ago I was blessed to be able to attend the AFCC and we subsequently devoted a PaperTigers issue to Singaporean Children’s Literature and the Asian Festival of Children’s Content.  This year Marjorie and I will both be attending and to say we are cloud 9 would be an understatement!

Last week the AFCC organizers held a press conference at the host hotel, Hotel Grand Pacific, right across the street from the official festival venue, theCentral Public Library.  Head on over to Dr. Myra Garces-Bacsal’s wonderful Gathering Books blog to read about and see photos from the press conference (click here). Also, be sure to check out Myra’s Pre-AFCC Glitter posts in which she will be conducting short interviews with AFCC invited guest speakers and other conference attendees. First up is Holly Thompson who will be launching her newest YA novel The Language Inside at AFCC, Holly was raised in the USA and is a longtime resident of Japan. Her verse novel Orchards (Delacorte/Random House) won the 2012 APALA Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature  and is a YALSA 2012 Best Fiction for Young Adults title. She recently edited Tomo: Friendship Through Fiction—An Anthology of Japan Teen Stories (Stone Bridge Press) and was a guest blogger on our blog last year. Click here to read her PaperTigers’ blog posts.

Marjorie and I will be participating in several of the AFCC sessions. First up for us is Marjorie’s seminar/workshop The Fine Art of Reviewing Children’s Books. Should you be attending  the AFCC we would love it if you were able to partake in this event! Details are as follows:

The Fine Art of Reviewing Children’s Books

Monday, May 27th
2:15pm – 5:45pm

Presentation:

• What makes a good book? What makes a good review?
• The components of a book review.
• Choosing books to review,

Break

Workshop:

• Group-discussion, reviewing a book
• Writing a review for publication

Marjorie Coughlan is the Editor of PaperTigers.org, a website and blog which seeks to highlight the richness of multicultural books from and/or about anywhere in the world, with a particular focus on the Pacific Rim and South Asia. PaperTigers.org is part of PaperTigers: Books+Water and includes the WaterBridge Outreach program.

Following the massive earthquake that took place on March 11, 2011  in northeast Japan, author Holly Thompson, who resides in Yokohama, knew she had help in some way. She put out the call to writers who had a connection with Japan and asked them to submit their stories for a benefit anthology that would support teens affected by the quake.  Tomo: Friendship Through Fiction – An Anthology of Japan Teen Stories was published on the one year anniversary of the quake and all sale proceeds go to organizations that assist teens in the quake and tsunami hit areas. Tomo, which means friend in Japanese, aims to bring Japan stories to young adult readers worldwide, and in so doing, help support teens in Tohoku. The book contains contributions from creators of prose, poetry and graphic narrative, as well as translators, whose shared connection is Japan.  Their work makes for a remarkable collection.

PaperTigers Editor Marjorie Coughlan wrote in her review of  Tomo :

Many of the contributors’ names … may already be familiar to readers; others …will be less so, though famous in Japan.  A great deal of Tomo’s success lies in its blend of expertly translated older stories with contemporary, new writing, and this is true also of the stories’ content.  Many modern Japanese phenomena colour the stories, … yet these sit easily alongside more traditional stories.  The anthology is all the richer for its varied array of writing, and its success is also in a great part due to the skill of the different translators involved.  The excellent Tomo blog also contains interviews with the contributors and offers readers further insight into Japanese culture.

Exciting news from Holly Thompson is that Tomo now has a Reader’s Guide which can be downloaded as a PDF file by clicking here.  Included in the Reader’s Guide are author and translator interviews, writing activities (creative writing, translation and academic writing) and discussion questions, both general and story by story, to accompany the Tomo anthology.

More exciting news is that Tomo contributor, illustrator and author Debbie Ridpath Ohi, was interviewed in the March 2013 issue of OWL Kids magazine about her involvement with Tomo as well as her work with the organization Toronto To Japan . Plus her artwork is featured in the header of the article! (Click here to see PaperTigers’ recent interview with Debbie and a gallery of her illustrations).

And there’s more! This month Part 1 of Marji Napper‘s short story “The Lost Property Office” which is published in Tomo appears in Cricket Magazine, with full color illustrations. Also featured in this issue, “a Japanese delight” according to the editors, are other stories stories related to Japan, so if you can get your hands on a copy of the magazine do have a look.

Later today we will be launching a new feature here on the PaperTigers’ blog entitled Global Voices. Each month we will be inviting a guest to join us and write three blog posts.  The posts will be published on three consecutive Wednesdays within each month under the title “Global Voices”. Our guests, located around the world,  are all involved in the world of kid and YA lit and include award winning authors and  illustrators, bloggers, librarians, educators and more! It is our hope that through the Global Voices posts we can better highlight the world of multicultural kid lit and YA lit in different countries around the world. The Global Voices line-up for May, June and July is:

Holly Thompson (Japan/USA)

Holly Thompson was raised in New England and is a longtime resident of Japan. Her verse novel Orchards (Delacorte/Random House) won the 2012 APALA Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and is a YALSA 2012 Best Fiction for Young Adults title. She recently edited Tomo: Friendship Through Fiction—An Anthology of Japan Teen Stories (Stone Bridge Press), and her next verse novel The Language Inside (Delacorte/Random House) will be published in 2013. Her picture book The Wakame Gatherers was selected by the National Council for the Social Studies in cooperation with the Children’s Book Council as ‘A Notable Social Studies Trade Book for Young People 2009′. Holly teaches creative writing at Yokohama City University and serves as the regional advisor of the Tokyo chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. Visit her website: www.hatbooks.com

Tarie Sabido (Philippines)

Tarie is a lecturer of writing and literature in the Philippines and blogs about children’s and young adult literature at Into the Wardrobe and Asia in the Heart, World on the Mind. She is also on the staff of Color Online, a blog about women writers of color for children, young adults and adults. Tarie was a judge for the 2009 Children’s and Young Adult Bloggers’ Literary Awards (CYBILS) and the 2010 Philippine National Children’s Book Awards. At the 2010 Asian Festival of Children’s Content, Tarie and I joined Dr. Myra Garces-Bacsal in the panel discussion Building a Nation of Readers via Web 2.0: An Introduction to the Kidlitosphere and the YA Blogsphere.

René Colato Laínez (El Salvador/USA)

René Colato Laínez was born in El Salvador. At the age of fourteen he moved to the United States, where he later completed the MFA program in Writing for Children & Young Adults at the Vermont College. René is the author of I Am René, the Boy, Waiting for Papá, Playing Lotería, René Has Two Last Names and The Tooth Fairy Meets El Ratón Pérez. His picture books have been honored by the Latino Book Award, the Paterson Prize for Books for Young People, the California Collection for Elementary Readers, the Tejas Star Book Award Selection, the New Mexico Book Award and he was named “Top Ten New Latino Authors to Watch (and Read)” by latinostories.com. His goal as a writer is “to produce good multicultural children’s literature; stories where minority children are portrayed in a positive way, where they can see themselves as heroes, and where they can dream and have hopes for the future. I want to write authentic stories of Latin American children living in the United States.” Read our 2006 interview with René here.

Fresh on the heels of her newly released YA novel-in-verse Orchards, Holly Thompson has embarked on another exciting adventure. She has taken on the job of editor of Tomo, a benefit anthology to support teens affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011.

Tomo 友, which means friend in Japanese, will be comprised of young adult fiction set in or related to Japan and will be published in print and digital formats by Stone Bridge Press in Spring 2012. The publication of Tomo will coincide with the one-year anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated vast areas of northeastern Japan and resulted in loss of life and livelihood for thousands of people.

Here’s what Holly has to say about the new project:

Why Tomo? As I explain on the Tomo blog, so many teens in Tohoku have lost parents, siblings, relatives, friends, homes, schools, and huge swaths of their cities, towns and villages. Their teen worlds have been upended. Many will suffer from post traumatic stress syndrome. Many will need financial support to complete their education.

Proceeds from the sales of the Tomo anthology will go to organizations that assist teens in the quake and tsunami hit areas. Tomo will link writers of young adult fiction with readers worldwide and the teens in Tohoku in need of their support.

Submissions will be accepted until August 15, 2011 and the guidelines can be found here.

Stone Bridge Press, with its focus on books related to Japan and Asia, is a perfect fit for this project. It is a pleasure to be working with the Stone Bridge team again. [N.B. Holly's book Ash - A Novel was published by Stone Bridge Press in 2001.]

The Tomo blog will feature news about the anthology, interviews with contributors, and information about the teens, locations and organizations that Tomo will support.

I am so excited about this new venture, to be in the editing role for a collection of Japan-related young adult fiction, and to be setting in motion a project that will benefit teens in the quake- and tsunami-affected areas who are coping with layer upon layer of loss. May their days ahead be full of promise… and friends from near and far.

We wish you much success with this new project, Holly, and congratulate you for taking on such an important initiative!