The Horn Book Magazine

Find more great Horn Book content at these links: Interviews with authors and illustrators Recommended books: reviews and themed booklists App and e-book reviews Movie reviews Event news and recaps Events calendar This week on hbook.com... This week on hbook.com... Nicholas Day Talks with Roger about A Riddle of Eels From the July/August 2026 Horn Book Magazine: Special Issue: ALA Awards: 2026 CSK Author Award Acceptance by Jewell Parker Rhodes 2026 CSK Illustrator Award Acceptance by R.

Talks with Roger is a sponsored supplement to our free monthly e-newsletter, Notes from the Horn Book. To receive Notes, sign up here. Sponsored by Fresh off winning the 2026 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for Nonfiction for A World Without Summer, about volcanoes, climate change, and Frankenstein, Nicholas Day — again — surprises us with a picture book foray into the eel, of all creatures, as exemplar of the limits on what we know. Illustrated by Corey R.

As is often the case, this year's American Library Association Annual Conference, in Chicago, was a perfect mix of exhausting and exhilarating, with a heaping dose of there being not enough hours in the day to get to all the fantastic programs, events, panels, sites, signings, etc.

Photo: David Walter Banks. Good morning. It is immensely gratifying to be here with you celebrating those who are dedicated to creating and uplifting and deploying the greatest gift we possess as human beings: the ability to transform our thoughts, emotions, ideas, imaginations, and experiences into art.

Find more great Horn Book content at these links: Interviews with authors and illustrators Recommended books: reviews and themed booklists App and e-book reviews Movie reviews Event news and recaps Events calendar We have received a couple of messages recently from people asking if the email they got from Bertha Mahony Miller on behalf of the Horn Book was real or a scam. IT IS A SCAM.

My ten-year-old grandson arrived at the auditorium clutching not one book, not two books, but three books. He wouldn't necessarily be reading them, but he needed them, like a fish needs gills, like a bicycle needs wheels, like Penn needs Teller. The occasion was the first of several concerts performed by middle-school band-camp students on a small university campus. This grandson’s older brother was playing drums in a rock band and percussion in a large band.

When Twilight Comes: The Animals and Plants That Bring Dawn and Dusk to Life by Marcie Flinchum Atkins; illus. by Michelle Morin Primary    Chronicle    48 pp. 3/26    9781797216799    $19.99 In this nonfiction picture book, flora and fauna of all kinds—from the striped skunk to the squash bee, from the white-tailed deer to the evening primrose—are spotlighted during the twilight hours of a Virginia summer.

The illustrator as a young boy. Photo courtesy of R. Gregory Christie. It’s hard to put a life into a few hundred words. But moments like this make you look back. I see a kid who spent a lot of time in the library, just trying to figure things out, looking at books with that same Coretta Scott King Award seal on them. And somehow that turned into a life in books. I grew up in the seventies and eighties as a latchkey kid. After school, I had a routine.

Jewell as a child. Photo courtesy of Jewell Parker Rhodes. Abandoned by a teen mother, living in a poor, segregated neighborhood, I was raised by my grandmother with love, the musical rhythms of the African American oral tradition at the intersection of spirituality replete with dreams, signs, and numbers. She’d say: “The dead are alive. Always”; “Jewell, child, do good, and it’ll fly right back to you”; “All things alive: Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water”; “Signs everywhere.

Let me start with a confession. After the Children’s Literature Legacy Award Committee’s call in January, after I stopped laughing and then stopped crying, I started worrying. Was this some sort of retirement award? Was ALSC handing me the gold watch? I had visions of Claudette McLinn waving me away, saying, “Thirty years and fifty-three books is more than enough.” And me, pleading, “But wait! I’m still writing!” Let me start with a confession.