Remembering Tomie dePaola
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Tomie dePaola. Credit: Laurent Linn
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A Letter from Lin Oliver:
Hi Everyone,
By now you have probably heard the sad news that our beloved Tomie dePaola passed away from a head injury sustained after he fell in his barn last Thursday.
I am incredibly sad–bereft, really. Tomie’s role in SCBWI was huge. He was an early Board member, and gave one of our first keynote banquet speeches during which he read The Clown of God to a tearful audience. He was a tireless advocate for illustrators, and was the one who insisted we include illustrators in our name (before him, it was the SCBW). He conducted the first master class intensive at the conference. He sponsored the Tomie dePaola award, now called the Narrative Art Award. He spoke at so many conferences, loved our organization and our community. His art was featured on the very first full color Bulletin cover. He never said no to anything we asked.
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SCBWI Digital Combats the Social Distancing Blues
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As the COVID-19 emergency has changed daily life all over the world, we have all needed to adapt to new behaviors and routines. SCBWI is no exception; on March 13, the headquarters office in Los Angeles was forced to shut down, and new strategies were put in place to allow SCBWI employees to work from home. Social distancing has hit everyone hard—but what does that mean for our creative pursuits?
We are very proud that SCBWI has been able to rise to this challenge, creating new member programs under the banner of
SCBWI Digital
, that will allow you to work, learn, and connect from the security of your home. The most recent of these is
SCBWI Digital Workshops
, a series of free digital webinars with celebrated authors, illustrators, editors, agents, and art directors, produced weekly online.These hour-long workshops are hosted live on Zoom to an audience of three thousand members; the recorded presentations will be posted on our website for all of our members to enjoy, for up to one month.
CLICK HERE
to watch a video from our Advisory Board
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SCBWI Recruits Director of Equity and Inclusion
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SCBWI is in the process of recruiting a person who will fill the crucial position of Head of Equity and Inclusion for the organization. This person will help us with all of our diversity initiatives, including reaching out to new members and leadership, training our staff and volunteers, developing best practices, vetting our materials and publications and grants and awards, and helping us develop innovative policies about increasing equity and inclusion in our organization and in the children’s book industry.
We have formed a relationship with Protégé Search, a firm experienced in recruitment of diversity officers for organizations big and small, and the search process is underway. We thought you’d be interested in hearing from Managing Partner
Rory E. Verrett
directly about our goals and plans.
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Join Us as We Open THE VAULT--SCBWI's Massive Video Archive
by Theo Baker
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Odds are, you are feeling stressed, disconnected, and a little bit all over the place. Most of you are probably reading this while hunkered down in your makeshift bunker.
I am also writing this from a bunker. But in my bunker, I am surrounded by a vast video archive that goes back over thirty years, and contains over 1,500 hundred hours of every great---and not so great---author, illustrator, editor, agent, publisher, and speaker that the SCBWI has had the privilege to host at its annual conferences. This material covers nearly every conceivable topic, problem, challenge, or idea that has ever arisen in children's literature.
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Best Five Platforms for Engaging Your Readers During COVID-19
by Kiana Martin
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With a growing number of students learning from home, educators and parents are flocking to the digital realm for engaging educational content. That’s where children’s book creators come in. For some, however, the act of creating and sharing digital media can seem like a steep climb towards proficiency. To make the ascent smoother, we gathered five resources (some you may already be using!) that will make communicating with your online audience painless and, dare we say, fun.
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Preparing for Online Pitch Contests:
How to Write a Killer Logline
by Laurie Miller
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In the current age of online pitchfests, loglines have become just as useful as query letters in getting agents and editors to read manuscripts. A well-written and intriguing one-sentence logline is often more than enough to pique interest in your story. Loglines can also be useful tools for getting to the heart of your story. If you’re struggling in revision to clarify your story’s theme or your protagonist’s goal, try writing a one-sentence logline!
For clarity, a logline is a one-sentence description of your book that encapsulates the central plot and hooks the reader. A good, hooky logline will answer the four central questions of who, when, what, and why.
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With many live events on hold, authors and illustrators are harmonizing with the current and taking to the SCBWInvite platform to share virtual events like live drawing demonstrations, readings, and performances. They’re also coming together to share remote learning resources like podcasts and teaching guides, hundreds of which you can find on the SCBWI Connects directory
here
. The tremendous outpouring of creativity and support during this time is a reminder that the community we are a part of is doing good things and that is something worth celebrating.
On SCBWInvite, our member events calendar, you can share your good thing with a community of other creators, librarians, parents, and teachers. If you’re new to the benefit, here’s why SCBWInvite is great for finding and sharing virtual events.
Learn. Continue growing in your craft with lectures, Q&As, workshops, and more. If you’re looking for events to attend, see what your fellow peers are hosting on SCBWInvite
here
.
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Happy Book Birthday Revamped
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Happy birthday to… your newest release! With our revamped
Happy Book Birthday
program, it’s more fun than ever to share your book’s debut with authors, illustrators, librarians, teachers, and other book buyers and readers.
Happy Book Birthday allows members to celebrate their new traditionally or independently-published books with the community and buyers to discover new titles to be inspired by and incorporate into their creative process, curriculum, or library. Since its launch, over 15,000 visitors have celebrated the release of 1,020 books (and counting!)
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SCBWI Exclusive With...
Kirby Kim, Agent, Janklow & Nesbit
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A native of Los Angeles, California, Kirby attended Pomona College and got his JD at UC Hastings College of the Law. Kirby got his first job in publishing working for Charlotte Sheedy Literary, at that time an affiliate of Sterling Lord Literistic, then moved to Vigliano Associates and WME. He is now at Janklow & Nesbit.
Kirby represents both literary and commercial authors. He’s most interested in receiving manuscripts that straddle the fence a bit, with upmarket expression combined with a genre element or plot device. When it comes to straight literary work, he’s alternatively drawn to rich, sweeping stories that try to encompass a time or a place or tightly written, narratively innovative stories or voices with award potential. His commercial interests include thrillers and mysteries, speculative fiction, and young adult.
He also represents a range of nonfiction, working with leaders and journalists in the areas of science, culture, business, and current affairs. Kirby is currently a board member of the Asian American Writers Workshop. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona with his wife and two kids.
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What Writers Do: A Reflection on Making Art During Quarantine
by Elana K. Arnold
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When I was younger, I fully bought into the dictate that “writers write every day,” probably because I was looking to confirm the way I felt—like an imposter and a failure. During graduate school I tried to commit to a daily practice, but for a solid ten years after earning my master’s degree, writing regularly eluded me, confirming my earlier suspicion that I was a fraud. Eventually I declared that I was not a writer. I was a reader.
So, I read—voraciously, across genres and categories, more playfully and joyfully than I had read since childhood. I read, and read, and read. I stuffed myself full of stories.
Ten years ago, I returned to writing at last. I found that the books I read during my years as “not a writer” stewed in some magic broth with my lived experiences, my observations, my emotions, and time. This amalgamation became stories of my own.
A month ago, I left on a book tour for my novel
Red Hood
. While I was on the road, my picture book
An Ordinary Day
was published, as well. But when I came home a week later, it was to a different world.
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SCBWI introduces FlashFic, a creative exercise to keep us all sharp over the coming months.
Tell us a story! Make us laugh or cry or fall in love with your protagonist--but you only have 265 characters to do it.
Tweet your super-short story along with the tag #SCBWIflashfic. You have one week to perfect your work. On Wednesday, April 8, we will choose two winners and tweet them out from the main SCBWI account. The winning stories will become prompts for illustrators to draw a scene inspired by the story of their choice and post it on either Twitter or Instagram. Then a winning illustration will be chosen, and the writers will have their turn again...
Join us in creating a chain of inspiration, to bind our community together in this time of physical distance.
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Nonfiction/Smithsonian Workshop Postponed
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Due to concerns about the coronavirus and a requirement from the Smithsonian that all gatherings be cancelled through May 3, SCBWI has decided to postpone the April 24-25 nonfiction workshop. If all goes well and the public health crises is resolved, the workshop will be held on September 4-5, 2020 at the National Museum of the American Indian.
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Draw This! is our monthly prompt word for illustrators. Artists can post their DrawThis! entries on Twitter and Instagram. View the March entries by searching the tag #SCBWIDrawThis.
Congratulations to the March winners! The prompt word was
"Climate Change"
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April's prompt word is:
Cooped Up
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