Bartography Express, September 2019
Hey there!
As longtime subscribers may remember, a couple of times each year I update my as-close-to-comprehensive-as-I-can-get list of all the children's literature and YA conferences and festivals put on by US colleges and universities.

My latest list of all the college kidlit conferences is now available , so if you know someone looking for a close-to-home opportunity to learn a lot about books for young people, please share.

And if you know of an event that I've overlooked, don't be shy about letting me know. I love learning of conferences and festivals to add, such as Texas A&M University-Commerce's newly revived Bill Martin Jr. Symposium , where I'll be keynoting this coming weekend.

Something new I recently started doing, as a step in my planning for school visits and appearances at conferences and festivals: using the map tool from Native Land Digital to learn about the Indigenous histories of the places I go and current information about the nations represented. 

I've since learned that the public sharing of this information is known as land acknowledgment, and I appreciated this post from Debbie Reese addressing how land acknowledgments and children's literature can work together .
Last month, I hinted at some big upcoming news, and now the news is out: What Do You Do with a Voice Like That? The Story of Extraordinary Congresswoman Barbara Jordan , written by me and illustrated by Ekua Holmes, is the Texas Great Read for 2019 .

I'm immensely grateful to the Texas Center for the Book at the Texas State Library and Archives Commission for selecting this book, and it was a joy to see photos of kids at the recent National Book Festival encountering our telling of Barbara Jordan's story.

Another piece of good news also came my way recently: My February 2020 book All of a Sudden and Forever: Help and Healing After the Oklahoma City Bombing , illustrated by Nicole Xu, has been named a Junior Library Guild selection.

For non-library folks, what this means is that the thousands of libraries subscribing to Junior Library Guild's collection-building service will be made aware of this book, which means that many, many young readers will be introduced to the story it tells. I'm so glad about that.
I've been traveling to Oklahoma more frequently these past few years, and My Favorite Author in the Whole Wide World and I are excited to be heading there again for a book festival in Oklahoma City on September 21.

The Oklahoma Book Festival lineup includes our friends and acclaimed authors Angela Cervantes , Carrie Fountain , Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich , and Traci Sorell and is headlined by 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley.

If you're in Oklahoma or know some book lovers who are, I hope you'll spread the word and send them our way.
My last stretch of summer travel took me to New Jersey and New York to research my upcoming (in 2022) nonfiction picture book about glitter .

From local library history rooms to the New Jersey State Library in Trenton to the libraries at the American Museum of Natural History and the Fashion Institute of Technology, I was reminded again and again of librarians' general helpfulness, frequent willingness to go above and beyond what a researcher might reasonably expect, and occasional possession of a startling amount of glitter.

The "Ford Focus or similar" that I rented at the Newark airport turned out to be a Dodge Charger , so that was fun, too, if a little excessive.

Now it's time for my monthly Q&A and new-book giveaway. My guest is Hena Khan, author of the middle-grade novel More to the Story . Hena's newest book — inspired by Louisa May Alcott's best-known work — was published last week by Salaam Reads/Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, which also published her previous novel, the much-lauded Amina’s Voice .

If you’re a Bartography Express subscriber with a US mailing address and you want the winner of More to the Story to be you, just say so in a reply to this email before midnight on September 30, and I’ll enter you in the drawing.

In the meantime, please enjoy my two-question Q&A with Hena Khan .