We are extra lucky today as not one but two experts have concocted a gourmet feast of their Top 10 favourite multicultural stories about food.  It seems fitting that authors Grace Lin and Jama Rattigan should each select food as their theme, since they have both written stories revolving around tasty recipes – as you will discover by looking at each of their menus.  In fact, each has put a book by the other on her menu, while unaware that the other was cooking up their own recipe, so it seems fitting that we should bring you the whole spread for you to gorge on at a single sitting – and it’s also interesting to see which books come up as double portions…

Jama Rattigan is the author of Dumpling Soup illustrated by Lilian Hsu-Flanders (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 1998);  The Woman in the Moon: A Story from Hawai’i illustrated by Carla Golembe (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 1996); and Truman’s Aunt Farm illustrated by G. Brian Karas (Sandpiper, 1996).  As well as her website (check out the recipe for Dumpling Soup), Jama also hosts the truly delectable Jama’s Alphabet Soup, a must-visit blog for anyone interested in children’s books, food, or both at the same time.

Grace Lin‘s latest book is Starry River of the Sky (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2012), the much-awaited companion novel to Newbery Honor Where the Mountain Meets the Moon (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2009).  She has written and illustrated many books for a wide age-range of children, including The Ugly Vegetables (Charlesbridge Publishing, 1999) and Dim Sum for Everyone (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2001); and picture books she has illustrated include Where on Earth is my Bagel? by Frances and Ginger Park (Lee & Low Books, 2001).  You can read our 2010 interview with Grace here, and view some of her beautiful artwork in our Gallery here and here.  And do check out Grace’s website and blog, where she has a fantastic giveaway on offer in celebration of the launch of Starry River of the Sky.

Top 10 Favorite Multicultural Picture Books about Food by Jama Rattigan

Whether it’s a big platter of noodles, warm-from-the-oven flatbread, fried dumplings, or a steamy bowl of Ugly Vegetable Soup, there’s nothing tastier than a picture book about food. You eat with your eyes first, then step into the kitchens or sit at the tables of friends and family from faraway places, all of whom seem to agree that love is the best seasoning for any dish, and food tastes best when it is happily shared. These tasty tales always make me say, “More, please!”

~ Apple Pie Fourth of July by Janet S. Wong and Margaret Chodos-Irvine (Harcourt, 2002)

~ Aunty Yang’s Great Soybean Picnic by Ginnie Lo and Beth Lo (Lee & Low, 2012)

~ Bee-Bim Bop! by Linda Sue Park and Ho Baek Lee (Clarion, 2005)

~ Cora Cooks Pancit by Dorina K. Lazo Gilmore and Kristi Valiant (Shen’s Books, 2009)

~ Duck for Turkey Day by Jacqueline Jules and Kathryn Mitter (Albert Whitman, 2009)

~ Hiromi’s Hands by Lynne Barasch (Lee & Low, 2007)

~ Hot, Hot Roti for Dada-ji by F. Zia and Ken Min (Lee & Low, 2011)

~ The Have a Good Day Café by Frances Park and Ginger Park, illustrated by Katherine Potter (Lee & Low, 2005)

~ The Ugly Vegetables by Grace Lin (Charlesbridge, 1999)

~ Too Many Tamales by Gary Soto and Ed Martinez (Putnam, 1993)

 

My Top Ten Food-Themed Multicultual Books by Grace Lin

In my family instead of saying hello, we say, “Have you eaten yet?” Eating and food has always been a successful way to connect us to culture, familiar as well as exotic–perhaps because it’s so enjoyable! So these books about food can be an appetizer to another country, a comfort food of nostalgia or a delicious dessert of both. Hen hao chi!

~ Hiromi’s Hands by Lynne Barasch (Lee & Low, 2007)

~ Ganesha’s Sweet Tooth by Sanjay Patel and Emily Haynes, illustrated by Sanjay Patel (Chronicle Books, 2012)

~ Bee-Bim Bop! by Linda Sue Park,illustrated Ho Baek Lee (Clarion, 2005)

~ How My Parents Learned to Eat by Ina R. Friedman, illustrated by Allan Say (Sandpiper, 1987)

~ Apple Pie Fourth of July by Janet Wong, illustrated by Margaret Chodos-Irvine (Harcourt, 2002)

~ Everybody Cooks Rice by Norah Dooley, illustrated by Peter Thornton (Carolrhoda Books, 1992)

~ Yoko by Rosemary Wells (Hyperion, 1998)

~ Auntie Yang’s Great Soybean Picnic by Ginnie and Beth Lo (Lee & Low, 2012)

~ Peiling and the Chicken-Fried Christmas by Pauline Chen (Bloomsbury, 2007)

~ Dumpling Soup by Jama K. Rattigan, illustrated by Lillian Hsu Flanders (Little, Brown, 1998)

Second up in our Top-10 series in celebration of PaperTigers’ 10th Anniversary, we are delighted to welcome poet Janet Wong with her choice of multicultural poetry books.  Janet is herself the acclaimed author of an impressive list of poetry collections and fiction for all ages of young people, including Twist: Yoga Poems,  Night Garden: Poems from the World of Dreams and Knock on Wood: Poems about Superstitions, all stunningly illustrated by Julie Paschkis; Homegrown House illustrated by E. B. Lewis; and the middle-grade free-verse Minn and Jake novels.

Recently, Janet has embraced e-publishing with several collections of her own poetry, including Once Upon a Tiger and Declaration of Interdependence: Poems for an Election Year. She has also collaborated with Sylvia Vardell on three PoetryTagTime e-collections of poetry. You can read Janet’s thoughts about e-publishing here, and also my 2008 interview with her here.

I love that Janet has selected one book for each year of PaperTigers – which has also made me chuckle, since the list is actually now 11. You may have noticed that Deborah Ellis’  Top 10 also had eleven titles, grouping two books together.  Could this be a theme?  Perhaps, a bit like a Baker’s Dozen, a Reader’s 10 actually equals 11?!

Top 10: Multicultural Poetry Picks (2002-2012) by Janet Wong

Picking my top ten multicultural poetry books of the past decade was pretty difficult; but I managed to stick to my goal and to limit myself to only one title published in each of the ten years of the existence of PaperTigers. Here are ten books for young people that I love, some collections and some novels in verse. Please look for them at your library—and give them as gifts to your library if you can’t find them there. Read from these books aloud, a few pages now and then, when you have time. A poem is a perfect 5-minute pick-me-up, like a snack for the mind.

2002:   19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East by Naomi Shihab Nye

2003:   Locomotion by Jacqueline Woodson

2004:   Under the Breadfruit Tree by Monica Gunning, illustrated by Fabricio Vanden Broeck

2005:   A Wreath for Emmett Till by Marilyn Nelson, illustrated by Philippe Lardy

2006:   Thanks a Million by Nikki Grimes, illustrated by Cozbi A. Cabrera

2007:   Tap Dancing on the Roof by Linda Sue Park, illustrated by Istvan Banyai

2008:   Becoming Billie Holiday by Carole Boston Weatherford, illustrated by Floyd Cooper

2009:   Yum! MmMm! Que Rico! by Pat Mora, illustrated by Rafael Lopez

2010:   Amazing Faces collected by Lee Bennett Hopkins, illustrated by Chris Soentpiet

2011:   Under the Mesquite by Guadalupe Garcia McCall

2012:   The Wild Book by Margarita Engle

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Irene Latham at Live Your Poem – Irene has a group zoo poem on offer today so head on over.

And P.S. We’ve just launched our own Facebook Page – PaperTigers: Books + Water – do visit us.

No matter if words or illustrations, books or e-books, every form of modern children’s books struggles with issues of representation and inclusion of children and families of all cultures, races, religions, classes, ethnicities, and backgrounds.  Far too often works for children do not reflect the diversity of the world, English-speaking or otherwise. Since our own forum is cyber-based, it only makes sense that the question of multicultural e-books for children should arise on this PaperTigers feature.  Here is a far from conclusive set of suggestions for initial forays into the multicultural children’s e-book world, arranged approximately by reading age, youngest to oldest.  This post rounds up our focus on multicultural children’s e-books.  If you’ve just arrived in the discussion, do take a look at my earlier post, e-troducing the e-book, as well as our interviews with authors Janet Wong and Hazel Edwards.

Janet Wong, illustrated by Sladjana Vasic,
Once Upon A Tiger: New Beginnings for Endangered Animals
OnceUponATiger.com, 2011.

Learning has never been this interactive. Poet and author Janet Wong supplements her poems about a range of endangered animals, from the familiar whale and polar bear to the tongue-twisting axolotl and mouth-filling Sumatran rhinoceros, with nonfiction information about each particular animal’s stories. A Once Upon A Tiger website pushes interactivity, allowing readers to write and send poems of their own.

Dub Leffler,
Once There Was a Boy
Magabala Books, 2011.

Ages 3+

This exquisite, fragile picture book tells the story of a boy who lives alone on an ancient boat on a beach until one day, a girl appears. A disarmingly evocative, gentle story of friendship, separation and reconciliation propelled through breathtaking illustrations.

Andrea Cheng,
Only One Year
Lee & Low Books, 2010.

Ages 7-10

This slender, gentle chapter book introduces readers to a serious subject rarely discussed in children’s literature. After he turns two, Di Di’s parents, immigrants from China, decide to send him to China for the year to live with his grandparents, learn Chinese, and know his family. Told from the point of view of Di Di’s older sisters Sharon and Mary (ages 9 and 6), Only One Year addresses the confusion, shame, embarrassment, and sadness they feel trying to come to terms with this common immigrant family custom, and to their own fears that their American friends will not understand, and that Di Di in turn will return having forgotten America and his American sisters.  Read a full review.

Monica Brown, illustrated by Rafael Lopez,
My name is Celia / Me llamo Celia: The Life of Celia Cruz /la vida de Celia Cruz
Luna Rising, 2004.

Ages 8-12

Growing up in a large Cuban family, baby Celia loves music more than everything, even though her father wants her to be a teacher. After revolution begins in Cuba, Celia flees prejudice and violence and learns how to make her way through the world, sharing her love of music with everyone she meets. The other two titles in Monica Brown’s My Name is/Me llamo… series, My Name Is Gabito and My Name is Gabriela are also available as e-books.

Ching Yeung Russell,
Tofu Quilt
Lee & Low Books, 2010.

Ages 9+.

Yeung Ying’s mother might understand that girls are just as good as boys, but in 1960s Hong Kong, all Yeung Ying hears from everyone else is how important boys are. After her mother saves precious money to send Yeung Ying to school, she begins to imagine a dream centered around writing, relayed here in thirty-eight poignant, free-verse chapters that tell the story of a girl and a culture each finding their identities.  Read a full review.

Guadalupe Garcia McCall,
Under the Mesquite
Lee & Low Books, 2011.

Ages 12+

Mexican-American Lupita struggles to keep her seven siblings and herself together after their mother is diagnosed with cancer. Facing chaos at home and the normal struggles of social life at high school, budding actress Lupita finds refuge “under the mesquite,” where she turns to writing to make sense of an unscripted world.

Hazel Edwards and Ryan Kennedy,
f2m: the boy within
Ford Street, 2010.

Ages 14+

Authors Hazel Edwards and Ryan Kennedy take on a subject until recently virtually absent from teen fiction, transgendered identities. When all-female punk rock band guitarist Skye decides to make the change from female to male – which is how she feels on the inside – she must come to grips with not only the physical changes her body undergoes, but also the emotional challenges of making and sticking to the decision.

Looking for more? Often the easiest multicultural books to find are those that have won prestigious awards, like the Newbery, CBCA or former Smarties Award, such as Where The Mountain Meets the Moon, The Watsons Go To Birmingham, or Hitler’s Daughter.

For one of the best resources for free e-books about all cultures, check out the International Children’s Digital Library, an online resource where you can sort by title, author, country, and award-winner.

As more publishers embrace e-publishing, more multicultural e-books will become available. In turn, as the technical potential for reproducing picture books increases, we will hopefully see more picture books making the leap. Today both traditional print books and e-books still consistently neglect and under-represent those peoples who themselves historically remain neglected and underrepresented. In turn, many of those engaged in the world of multicultural children’s literature hope that the ease e-books offer, particularly with new horizons of self-publishing and viral promotion, will impact both the ability to offer more books for children that represent all children in the world, as well as give all children access to books they might not otherwise reach.

Like the publication of multicultural children’s e-books itself, this list is a beginning. As always, we welcome your thoughts and suggestions. What other multicultural e-books have you read that you would recommend?

Continuing our exploration of the world of e-books for children, we’re asking practitioners and people on the ground about some of the challenges and triumphs for them personally, as well as for the children’s publishing industry as a whole.

Today we have with us Janet Wong, former lawyer turned children’s book author of numerous books, including A Suitcase of Seaweed, Me and Rolly Maloo, Twist: Yoga Poems, and Once Upon a Tiger, an illustrated e-book poetry collection about endangered animals, as well as three e-poetry collections, co-designed and edited with Sylvia Vardell: Poetry Tag Time, p*tag and the recently released Gift Tag. Janet’s many awards include the International Reading Association’s “Celebrate Literacy Award”.

We first interviewed Janet in 2008 and it’s great to welcome her back to PaperTigers to talk here about her experiences with e-books.

***

What was your inspiration for writing e-books? Was that your intention from the get-go, or was there an evolution in your creative process?

Sylvia Vardell and I hatched our PoetryTagTime project one year ago at the NCTE convention with one simple goal: to make poetry an impulse buy. Poetry books are too often neglected, left to collect dust on bookshelves. We wanted people to hear about our books, read a sample poem, click “buy” (for no more than the cost of a cup of coffee)–and fall in love with poetry!

Children’s books, particularly picture books, present specific challenges to the e-book industry in terms of faithful reproduction of art and story. They also present exciting opportunities for new forms of interaction. What limitations or challenges, expected or unexpected, have you personally experienced creating e-books for children, and in turn, what benefits have you discovered as compared to printed books?

Designing for the small black-and-white screen of the Kindle isn’t easy, especially since you can’t know what size font a reader will choose. A child who chooses a large font might end up breaking a poem’s lines in places where a line break might be, well, ugly. For our third PoetryTagTime venture, GIFT TAG, Sylvia came up with the name “Kindleku” to describe the form that we “invented” for the Kindle screen. This form allows a maximum of 10 lines and 25 characters per line (including spaces)–the most that will fit on a Kindle screen when it is set at Font Size 6 (though Font Size 4 is, in my opinion, the best size for reading most e-books). Douglas Florian called this form the “Kindlekuku” and we acknowledge in the intro that it was cuckoo to limit our poets to 250 characters per poem–but we think the poems are terrific!

Particularly in English-speaking countries, a common concern is the lack of diversity in children’s books. How do you think e-books might address such concerns, and how has your work engaged with issues of multicultural children’s books? 

More and more people are discovering the authors in themselves and soon will be using e-books to make their voices and stories heard. This is such an exciting time to be involved with books. There will be lots of awful books, just as there are lots of awful YouTube videos–but there will also be indie-published gems. I anticipate an explosion of diversity in subject matter and also books offered in many more languages. For instance, one of the e-books I’m working on is a ballad about the first famous Chinese poet, Qu Yuan, and the origins of the Dragon Boat Festival, that will appear in a bilingual Mandarin/English edition. I’m looking forward to publishing e-book versions of several of my books in several languages, from Korean to Lithuanian!

On a similar note, in the twentieth century the development of children’s rooms in public libraries marched hand-in-hand with growth in the children’s publishing industry. Do you think e-books will change the roles of traditional libraries, and how do you envision e-books reaching children of all incomes and backgrounds?

Thousands of copies of my e-books Once Upon a Tiger: New Beginnings for Endangered Animals and PoetryTagTime have been downloaded by children in Ghana and Kenya through the terrific Worldreader.org program–books that would’ve cost a fortune to ship to Africa. The newest Kindle includes a $79 version; with the abundance of free and cheap books, these e-readers might be the best way to reach children in circumstances where traditional libraries are not an easy option.

We love sneak previews! What are you working on at the moment? Do you plan for it to come out in print, as an e-book, or both?

Right now Sylvia and I are finishing up GIFT TAG, an anthology of holiday poems. This is the third book in our PoetryTagTime series. It will be available as an e-book for Kindles, Nooks, iPads, phones–and computers, too (many people are just discovering that they can download the free Kindle app to their regular computers). The book begins with a Thanksgiving poem by Jane Yolen and contains a reminder of the meaning of Christmas by Lee Bennett Hopkins, a whimsical dreidel poem by Douglas Florian, a Mew Year’s Day poem for cat-lovers by Children’s Poet Laureate J. Patrick Lewis, and 23 more poems about everything from getting your first bicycle to your first bottle of perfume, being a spider in a Christmas tree, and having your Christmas stocking pop!

If you were a fortune-teller, where would you predict the future lies for the evolution of the printed book vs. the e-book generally? 

Too often I hear people say something negative about e-books, followed by the phrase, “because I love books.” I love both ice cream and frozen yogurt; can’t we have both? I’ll make a bold prediction: e-book poetry anthologies will actually make print collections of poetry more popular than ever. I think a lot of people who are new to poetry will take a chance and spend $2.99 to buy an e-book anthology like PoetryTagTime, which will lead them to discover a bunch of poets that they’d never heard of before. You can’t read Allan Wolf’s poem in P*TAG about burping up kittens in Shanghai without wanting to read more of his work–which is currently mainly available in print books only.

What’s up next on your to-read e-book list? Do you have any favorite e-books that you’d recommend?

Each week I have a new favorite! Today’s favorite, though, is an OLD book: Opposites by Richard Wilbur. The line drawings come through really well on the Kindle, and the poems beg to be read again and again, of course–even just one poem at a time, when the mood strikes. That’s a great thing about a poetry book: you can read it a poem at a time and not feel like you’ve “lost your place”–and the poems are so short that you can read one on your phone while you’re waiting in line!

***

Thank you, Janet.

And the good news is that since doing the interview, Gift Tag has been released and is now available to buy… Time to get e-reading!

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Carol at Carol’s Corner.

[Sara Hudson joined our team of contributors last year, bringing her perception and love of children's books to the book reviews she has written for us. You can read more about her on our About Us page, including an allusion to her travels that have centered on book collections around the world (and, in fact, we first met Sara at the International Youth Library stand at the Bologna Book Fair last year...). With this post, Sara introduces a short series focusing on e-books for children that will include an overview of multicultural e-books and interviews with two authors who have embraced the e-book format, Janet Wong and Hazel Edwards.

- Marjorie]

e-troducing the e-book

The degree to which debates about e-books can polarize begins to make sense after we consider how we often frame their presence as a question of alleged murder. “Will the e-book kill off traditional books?” It’s the perennial question at the front of the mind of cultural critics and librarians hovering at the back of any crowd rushing out for the latest Kindle, iPad, Nook or other e-reader. In turn, the question of e-books draws its roots from deeper long-standing concerns, those surrounding the question “Is the book dead?”

Despite decades of worry, the book is not, in fact, dead; nor has the e-book yet killed off traditional books.  E-books developed from work in the mid-1970s to create image- and text-based publications for computers – themselves still a fairly new and ungainly technology. Advances in technologies and software programs ricocheted the development of e-books and their subsequent e-readers forward in the 1990s. Today e-books are visual and/or aural publications readable on digital devices, which often cost a fraction of the price of traditional books, and offer the advantage of portability and accessibility to large numbers of texts at once.

That said, the e-book industry remains in its infancy, and its approach to all books, especially those for infants and children, evolves every day.  E-book readers pose considerable technical issues. Amazon and Apple, two companies historically known not to play well with others, if at all, both have proprietary restrictions, so buyers can only read book purchases on Kindles or iPads, respectively (although you can download a Kindle reader to your PC). Additionally, as evidenced by the overarching debate about e-books, “Will they kill off traditional books?”, e-books evoke enormous emotional responses from readers. “Traditional” readers argue, for example, that reading a book on a machine cannot substitute for reading a physical book, that the medium is part of the message, that a machine is a sterile substitute for the tactile experience of reading.

The emotional questions of e-books reveal themselves nowhere as strongly as they do with e-books for children, particularly picture books aimed at early readers. As this recent article from The New York Times reports, “[e-books for children] represent less than 5 percent of total annual sales of children’s books, several publishers estimated, compared with more than 25 percent in some categories of adult books.” Children’s e-books present practical arguments (teething toddlers + expensive electronics = definite disaster), practical unknowns (when do bells and whistles enhance and when do they distract?), and questions of the practices of adults themselves, particularly those of middle class income, many of whom rely on their own ability to flip through a book – or that of a librarian, teacher, or fellow parent – to select it for bedtime reading.

Over the coming weeks, PaperTigers will explore questions at the intersection of children’s books, multicultural books and e-books. We’ll interview two authors who have written e-books, survey a sampling of multicultural children’s e-books, and start to frame some of the different perspectives that go into writing, illustrating, distributing and creating e-books for children. There’s sure to be a lot of ideas and opinions about e-books – don’t keep them to yourself; please join in the discussion by leaving a comment below…

Sylvia Vardell at Poetry for Children recently posted an article entitled “Poetry, Peace and USSBY” in which she discussed the presentation she and poet/artist Anna Grossnickle Hines would be giving at the 9th IBBY regional conference: Peace the World Together Through Children’s Books. Click here to read about their presentation “Peace Through Poetry for Young People”, learn about Anna’s new book Peace: A Recipe, and see the Poetry Books for Young People About War and Peace bibliography that Sylvia wrote.

And if you haven’t done so already, be sure to read PaperTigers’ post Poetry Friday: p*tag compiled by Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong to learn more about Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong‘s e-book p*tag. It’s an exciting anthology of 31 poems newly written and published to coincide with National Teen Read Week this month in the US: “the first ever electronic poetry anthology of new poems by top poets for teens”.

I’ve just bought my first e-book.  I realise that might fill some people with horror at how long it’s taken me to jump on the bandwagon, but it was always going to have to be something special that would propel me into action.  Perhaps if I spent more time on public transport, I might have succumbed to an e-reader by now, but as it is…  Anyway, I’ve just downloaded the free Kindle for PC and have taken the leap, tempted as I was by Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong‘s e-book p*tag. It’s an exciting anthology of 31 poems newly written and published to coincide with National Teen Read Week this month in the US: “the first ever electronic poetry anthology of new poems by top poets for teens” – and wow, what a roll of poets it is: check it out here.

Following on from the success of their PoetryTagTime project of children’s poetry in April during the US’s national poetry month, this game of poetry tag includes some simple rules to connect the poems – each one had to include three words from the previous person’s poems.  And an added twist is that the poets chose an image from this selection of photographs taken by Sylvia Vardell, as the inspiration for their poem. Each poet then also provided a short introduction to their choice of photograph. All this makes for a very exciting, energetic mix of poetry that can be read and enjoyed in many ways. I loved the added dimension of the word tag used in the cover photograph and to good effect in Janet Wong’s own poem “p*tag” – it rounds off the collection beautifully.

What’s really great is that the conceit of the tagging in no way defines the quality of the individual poems. From Marilyn Singer’s opening reverso poem “Time and Water”, you know you’re in for a treat. The array of names included several I’ve “met” through Poetry Friday, and others who are new to me – what a wonderful way for teenagers to encounter poetry; and the interactive nature of the e-book invites readers to explore each poet’s work more deeply. I was intrigued by Arnold Adoff’s introduction (as much a poem as his actual poem): in it he invites readers to email him so he can send the “original” in its, well, I’d like to say real format, but I’m not sure he would allow the word “real” to slip by – and it’s already on shaky ground in a discussion of e-books. Hmmm! Let’s quote then:

“this poem is in a format to fit the machine you are using now…
but feel free to be in touch [...]
and i’ll send you the “original” and we can talk about:
style and substance and the poet’s hard(est) head….

I’d like to think there’ll be some young poets getting in touch…

With so many ways to find a route into the collection (photographs, the three linking words, each poet’s introduction), not to mention the variety of viewing possibilities for its e-format, these exciting poems touch on so many emotions. From humor to deep pondering, there’s something here for every teen – even the so-called “Reluctant Reader” (Jaime Adoff), and like the goose (or is it a swan?) in Julie Larios’ “Walking, Waiting”, there’s the possibility of ‘a wild honk or two / or three that might surprise you.’

Find out more about this great e-collection here – and read our 2008 interview with Janet here, and this reprint of Sylvia’s article “Pairing Across Cultures” here.

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Great Kid Books, where Mary Ann Scheuer is also highlighting p*tag, as are other contributors. So head on over – there’s a feast on offer, as always…

National Poetry Month is held every April in Canada and the USA to celebrate poetry and its vital place in American and Canadian culture. Schools, literary organizations, communities, businesses and more celebrate National Poetry Month with a plethora of events including poetry readings, festivals, book displays, and workshops. The kidlitosphere is sure to be active with bloggers celebrating the month – and one blog that you definitely don’t want to miss out reading is Sylvia Vardell’s Poetry for Children!

Sylvia is a professor of children’s and young adult literature at Texas Woman’s University, author of Poetry Aloud Here! Sharing Poetry with Children in the Library (ALA Editions, 2006), Poetry People: A Practical Guide to Children’s Poets (Libraries Unlimited, 2007), and Children’s Literature in Action: A Librarian’s Guide (Libraries Unlimited, 2008). She is co-editor of Bookbird, the journal of international children’s literature, co-editor of the annual review guide Librarians Choices and is also the poetry columnist for the American Library Association’s Book Links magazine.

Our April 2008 PaperTigers’ Poetry issue featured a reprint of Sylvia’s article Pairing Poems Across Cultures (which offered insights on the similarities and differences in poetry from parallel cultures) as well as a reprint of an interview that Cynthia Leitich Smith did with Sylvia in 2007. In 2010 we were thrilled to meet up with Sylvia at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair and had a great chat with her.

Last April, to celebrate National Poetry Month, Sylvia played a game of Poetry Tag on her blog. Poets shared original poems, tagged another poet who shared a poem connected with the previous poem, and on and on. It was such a success that it led her and author Janet S. Wong to compile an anthology of 30 e-poems by 30 e-poets called PoetryTagTime.  This first ever electronic-only poetry anthology for children has new poems by many top poets writing for young people, and can be purchased for 99 cents here.

For this year’s National Poetry Month celebrations Sylvia says :

I’m sticking with my “tag” theme this year, too, as we pause to promote poetry far and wide. However, this time, I’m featuring reviews of poetry books out this year (2011), connected in that same “tag” fashion, from one to another. Plus, I’ve involved my students enrolled in my graduate course in poetry for children as guest reviewers. Some of them even tried creating digital trailers for their selected books. So, here we go: one review a day for the next 30 days, your mini intro to the latest poetry for young people.

So head on over to Poetry for Children and join in the celebrations!

Pondering about the mix and match of traits that make her who she is, Janet Wong writes:

Face It 

My nose belongs
to Guangdong, China–
short and round, a Jang family nose.

My eyes belong
to Alsace, France–
wide like Grandmother Hemmerling’s.

But my mouth, my big-talking mouth, belongs
to me, alone.

Hurray for Janet’s “big-talking mouth”, which has given us many wonderful words such as these to savor! You can listen to Janet telling stories and reading her magical poems here.

Poetry Friday today is being hosted by Anastasia Suen at Picture Book of the Day.

Poet Janet Wong’s energy and dynamism really struck me when I interviewed her for our current issue of PaperTigers, and these qualities really come through in her recent interview with Elaine at Wild Rose Reader. It focuses on “her experience as a student in a master class on poetry taught by the late Myra Cohn Livingston, one of America’s foremost children’s poets and anthologists” – as well as being a great read itself, the comments that follow on from the interview have kept the conversation going…

Not only that, but Janet and Elaine have also invited readers of the interview to write their own poems including the words ring, drum and blanket, as this used to be one of Myra’s homework assignments. You can still join in – and if you need inspiration, you can read Janet and Elaine’s own offerings; there’s a great poem called Dragon Boat Festival by Diane Davis; and Cloudscome, Miss Rumphius Effect and Writing and Ruminating have all taken the challenge in wonderful and very different directions too.