Traveling to Saipan

Managaha Island, Saipan

I’ve been invited to return to Saipan this July to help teach a special “on site” symposium for educators. I invite you to “come along.”

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Swish, Basketball

What is a friend?

I am honored to have a poem included in What is a Friend?, the newest poetry anthology from Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong. (Listen to me read this essay. Scroll…

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Read at Home: a New School Year

Selecting books

Approximately 450 subscriptions of Highlights’ High Five children’s “learning and literacy” magazine will begin arriving at schools on a variety of tribal nations.

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Walking Grandma Home

Walking Grandma Home

Looking forward to Walking Grandma Home being available to children and families, January 10, 2023, from Zonderkidz.

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Jane Yolen

Jane Yolen

Can you tell us how your recent book When Nana Dances came to be? My co-author on this book, Maddison Stemple-Piatt, is my granddaughter. She was ten years old, in ballet…

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Mental Health: The Giver

The Giver

Lois Lowry: “I think it’s something that literature does, that writing does, that speaking about things does. It keeps our hearts from breaking.”

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Writing the Story of Mental Illness for Young Readers

Romancing the Dark in the City of Light

I have been pulled toward the subject of suicide since I was a teen despite its stigma, and worked on my first suicide hotline when I was eighteen. That’s because as an adolescent I struggled not only with depression but with some periods of suicidality, and I understand the dangerous power and seduction of it when one is suffering mental despair.

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Kindness

Sunrise

You don’t have to be good or first
Not even smartest or most right.
If you are kind, that is what our world needs most.

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Read at Home

Read at Home

Remember when you were a child and how fun it was to have your very own copy of Highlights … or any children’s magazine? Children haven’t changed.  Research shows that…

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