"Access to books shouldn't be a gift, it should be a given," said Doug Salati, 2023 Caldecott winner for Hot Dog, which he also wrote. His statement summarized the overall theme of the American Library Association's annual conference, held in Chicago over the weekend.

Doug Salati

Salati's mother, a public school teacher, brought home to him and his sister the works of luminaries such as Tomie dePaola, Trina Schart Hyman, Ed Young, John Steptoe, Anita Lobel, and Maurice Sendak. "Being read to is a fundamental joy that many of us never grow out of," said Salati. "The gift of storytelling," was the first of five gifts on which he focused his acceptance speech at the 2023 Newbery/Caldecott/Legacy banquet on Sunday night.

Hot Dog took shape over 10 years of "growth, change, and transition," said Salati. He received his second gift, the gift of space, after he finished graduate school a decade ago and was offered a Sendak Fellowship, where he overlooked the Green Mountains of Vermont; he shed the stress of city life and began a story about a dog he'd met on the beach. He bonded with dePaola, a visiting artist to the Sendak fellows, over Salati's appreciation of the work of Trina Schart Hyman, dePaola's close friend. They stayed in touch, and dePaola even offered Salati the chance to illustrate one of his manuscripts.

At the fellowship, Salati received his third gift, the gift of process, when Lynn Caponera asked him to help catalogue Sendak's work. "Here was tangible evidence that an artist does not spring forth, fully formed," Salati said. Great work takes many drafts, many dummies, daily dedication, and lifelong passion. Salati once dreamed of living in "a hollowed-out tree like Sam Gribley" in Jean Craighead George's My Side of the Mountain because "I wasn't quite sure how or where I'd fit in," he said. Instead, he moved to New York City, where he found his fourth gift: community. He studied with Rachael Cole and Sara Varon at the School of Visual Arts, and later moved into a shared studio with Brian Floca, Sophie Blackall, and Rowboat Watkins, guided by "persistent lunch-table inquiries" about his work. His fifth is the gift of relationships, which also includes his editor at Knopf Books for Young Readers, Rotem Moskovich, who saw Salati's graduate exhibition and planted the seeds for Hot Dog.

Amina Luqman-Dawson

"Freewater is a work of restoration," said 2023 Newbery Medalist Amina Luqman-Dawson about her first book for young people. When she thinks about how it will be received, "I think less about book bans and more about the people I had in mind while writing it." She thanked Alexandra Hightower, her editor at jimmy patterson books/Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, the first African American editor to have edited a Newbery Medal-winning book, and to We Need Diverse Books, which brought together Luqman-Dawson and Kathi Appelt as a fellow author and mentor, and now, a friend.

Luqman-Dawson spoke of the librarian at the Leland R. Weaver Library in South Gate, Calif., who taught her that "I had the power to read anything I wanted. What I read was my choosing. That's what makes the library sacred." Today she sees literary voices, "especially Black and LGBTQIA+ voices, being erased from our libraries and classrooms," a continuation of past efforts. "Slavery's engineers and supporters were resolute and complete in having the voices of enslaved African men, women and children erased from history." Yet the stories live on, residing within the families of their descendants through oral traditions, she said: "Each word, each story is precious."

People ask Luqman-Dawson why she didn't write Freewater as a nonfiction book--the fascinating story of the maroons, enslaved people who escaped and lived in secret in the wilderness. "I'm really in the business of restoration," she replies. "In Freewater, it is the children who do that work. They create a bridge across the disconnected space." Her hope is "for the nation's enslaved ancestors to find a place in our historical imagination." In a place where, "when we think of them, we know to be inspired and awed by their role in history."

James E. Ransome

"I'm not done yet," said 2023 Legacy Award-winner James E. Ransome. "I have plans, ideas, and contracts, and God willing, I'll be around a lot longer." Ransome's first book was edited by Dick Jackson, Do Like Kyla, with text by Angela Johnson(Orchard Books), "and it's still in print after 33 years."

Ransome spoke of the power of books to connect us, not just as book creators, book champions, and readers, but also through place and imagination. Ransome recently attended the 31st African American children's Book Fair in Philadelphia, where he met Luqman-Dawson. Ransome grew up in Rich Square, N.C., not far from where Freewater is set, a place he had discovered through Whitfield Lovell's installation SANCTUARY: The Great Dismal Swamp. Ransome grew up with his grandmother, who couldn't drive, read, or write, but who always found enough to keep her grandson in comic books, pencils, and paper to study those comics images. As a teen, he moved to New Jersey to live with his mother, and suddenly he had access to eight art teachers, photography and drawing, painting and art classes. His high school art teacher, Charlie Bogasat, encouraged Ransome to attend Pratt Institute, where he met his wife and frequent collaborator, author Lesa Cline-Ransome.

James E. Ransome dedicated his 2023 Legacy Award to Jerry Pinkney. "To be standing here without him is bittersweet," Ransome said. "He opened his heart, his studio, and his family to me." Ransome cited the work of people like Tom Feelings, Virginia Hamilton, and Pinkney as having a powerful influence on him. "Books, reading and art should have an emotional tug on us, and change us or reframe the way we see the world." --Jennifer M. Brown, photos by Siân Gaetano

To counter the next Amazon Prime Day, scheduled for July 11 and 12, the American Booksellers Association is launching "The Future Is Indie" campaign, which "champions the importance of independent businesses in shaping the future. The campaign seeks to inspire consumers to actively engage with independent businesses and make conscious choices that contribute to a better future--more economically sound, more vibrant, more interesting, and more diverse."

A highlight of the summer campaign is a mini-Oracle deck of six tarot cards (r.), which can be used to do "fun and informed bookish readings as they relate to the indie bookstore experience from a reader's perspective. The card readings range from engaging one's curiosity, to fighting temptation, to receiving personal recommendations." The campaign also includes digital assets, printable posters, suggested copy, as well as "The Future Is Indie" T-shirts available from Bonfire.

The ABA recommends booksellers tag @americanbooksellers and use the hashtag #TheFutureIsIndie on social media posts.

For more details and information, click here.

In response to the new Texas law that requires suppliers of books to school libraries, librarians, and teachers to rate the books' sexual content, both on future sales and retroactively, Brilliant Books, Traverse City, Mich., is offering a free store membership to all K-12 students in Texas. Students can redeem their memberships, which normally cost $25 and include a range of discounts, free shipping, and other perks, simply by placing an order to be shipped to Texas and noting the school they attend.

Brilliant Books says it works with schools and teachers across the country, including Texas, and are familiar with regulations surrounding school purchases, but call this legislation different.

"This is putting all of the responsibility for rating the content of these books on the organizations that are selling them," Caitlin Marsh, director of digital marketing at Brilliant Books, said. "So every bookseller has to perform these ratings and provide them to the schools if they want to sell books to those schools. Independent bookstores like us, we're not in a position to be able to do that on any kind of consistent or reasonable scale. There are just way too many books. It's really just not possible for a small organization to be able to comply with this law."

Marsh said that the store works with "only a handful" of Texas schools and teachers and is "not an especially familiar bookstore for most of these kids," but wants to help the people affected by the law as well as call out the law. "This is a major piece of legislation, and it does affect more than just school kids in Texas," Marsh said. "It affects booksellers nationwide, and it affects other state legislatures that might use this bill as an example."

Henry Petroski

Henry Petroski, "who demystified engineering with literary examinations of the designs and failures of large structures like buildings and bridges, as well as everyday items like the pencil and the toothpick," died June 14, the New York Times reported. He was 81. A longtime professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke University, Petroski "adapted the architectural axiom 'form follows function' into one of his own--'form follows failure'--and addressed the subject extensively in books, lectures, scholarly journals, and magazines."

"Failure is central to engineering," he said in a 2006 Times profile. "Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail."

In his first book, To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (1985), Petroski examined what happens when design goes terribly wrong, citing the collapse in 1981 of two skywalks in the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel, which killed 114 people; and the collapse in 1940 of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington a few months after it opened.

Shortly after the Hyatt Regency calamity, one of his neighbors asked him how such a thing could happen. "He wondered," Petroski wrote, "did engineers not even know how to build so simple a structure as an elevated skywalk?" The book was an attempt to define what an engineer is.

Pencils also became an object for Petroski's failure analysis. He used engineering equations in a 1987 paper in the Journal of Applied Mechanics to describe why pencil points break, then expanded the piece two years later into the book The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance. 

Nearly two decades after The Pencil was published, Petroski "turned to an even humbler quotidian object with The Toothpick: Technology and Culture (2007), which explained its evolution from a form used by early hominids to the creation of the modern toothpick industry in the 19th century," the Times noted.

Petroski taught engineering at the University of Texas at Austin for six years before joining the Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Ill., in 1974. He left in 1980 for Duke, where his teaching schedule gave him the freedom to write about engineering. He retired in 2020. 

Petroski's other books include The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts--From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers--Came to Be as They Are (1992); The Book on the Bookshelf (1999); Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design (2003); To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure (2012); and The House With Sixteen Handmade Doors: A Tale of Architectural Choice and Craftsmanship (2014).

"He worked at the intersection of engineering and history," said Earl Dowell, a former dean of Duke's Pratt School of Engineering. "His readership included a wide range of engineers who enjoyed his books because they presented the bigger picture of engineering, not so much down in the details, and non-engineers."

Colleen Hoover (r.) poses with Jenna Bush Hager after their panel discussion at Book Bonanza, Hoover's annual book festival, at the Gaylord Texan Resort & Convention Center in Grapevine, Texas, last Friday.

"This is Bill and Kelly. Bill and Kelly got married today and chose to spend their honeymoon at Blacksburg Books. Bill and Kelly have excellent taste," Blacksburg Books, Blacksburg, Va., posted on Instagram. "Okay but not really--they just stopped by after the ceremony but we got really excited about it. Congratulations Bill and Kelly!"

Ingram's Consortium Book Sales & Distribution has added four publishers, effective with the fall 2023 season:

Learning Roots, a publisher of creative Islamic educational resources that was founded in London to help parents raise great Muslim children. Learning Roots has created more than 50 resources ,including the Kiitab, a digital device that helps young readers learn Arabic. Among fall titles are The Amazing Muslim World by Zaheer Rhatri and Way to Jannah by Yasmin Mussa.

Our World My Roots, which creates culture-rich, informative, and engaging nonfiction books for kids. Each book embarks on an adventure in a different country and explores geography, people, traditions, and culture. For every book sold, Our World My Roots donates part of the proceeds to a fund that supports charities in each respective country. Key titles for the fall season include four books by Anna Makanda: Ghana; Jamaica; Nigeria; and Zimbabwe.

Trigger Publishing, established in 2017, which creates bibliotherapy resources to support mental health recovery. Fall titles include The Smart Girls Handbook: How to Silence Self-doubt, Find Your Purpose and Redefine the Impossible by Scarlet V Clark and Stress Less: Mindfullness for Teenagers (By a Teen for Teens) by Adam Avin.

Young Authors Publishing, which shares fiction and nonfiction by BIPOC writers and communities. Young Authors offers space for underrepresented voices to share their own stories on their own terms through projects that celebrate the uniqueness of the human experience. Key titles for fall include Not Too Anything by 11-year-old Pepper Persley and the Kinfolk Meditation Deck created by the Aya Paper Company.

"This is simply a bookshop and customer appreciation post," Back Again Bookshop, Myrtle Beach, S.C., noted on Facebook. "Every day I have the privilege of opening up the doors to this beautiful space and being surrounded by books, cats, and good people. We built this together as a family and a community and we couldn't have done it without everyone's support. If you haven't been to the bookshop in a while, swing by! We are always expanding our selection and refining our processes. We love it when people stop in after a few months and comment on the changes. I am so excited to see what happens next!"

Tomorrow:
Tamron Hall: Lewis Howes, author of The Greatness Mindset: Unlock the Power of Your Mind and Live Your Best Life Today (Hay House, $26.99, 9781401971908).

The Talk repeat: Lisa Guerrero, author of Warrior: My Path to Being Brave (Hachette Books, $28, 9780306829499).

New video footage and photos have been released from The Great Gatsby--The Immersive Show, which opened off-Broadway on June 25. Immersive Everywhere's production, based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel, made its American and New York City debut in Gatsby Mansion in the Park Central Hotel, after a successful run in the U.K., Broadway World reported. 

Adapted and directed by Alexander Wright, The Great Gatsby--The Immersive Show stars Joél Acosta as Jay Gatsby, Rob Brinkmann as Nick Carraway, Jillian Anne Abaya as Daisy Buchanan, and Shahzeb Hussain as Tom Buchanan. The cast also includes Stephanie Rocío, Keivon Akbari, Claire Saunders, Mya Rosado-Tran, Nicholas Caycedo, Kiki Burns, Anika Braganza, Charlie Marcus, Jeremiah Ginn, and Stephanie Cha. 

Gatsby Mansion in the Park Central Hotel New York "has been transformed into a new immersive nightspot. With its own private entrance on 55th Street and Seventh Avenue, visitors will directly enter Gatsby Mansion," Broadway World noted. "A complete renovation covering over 16,000 square feet of the Park Central Hotel New York ballroom space will deliver audiences into a fully immersive and enthralling world of music, stories and wonders straight out of the 1920s."

The 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction was awarded to Tom Crewe for his novel The New Life. Chair of judges Boyd Tonkin praised the book for how it "re-imagines the lives of the late Victorian writers Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds in the immediate aftermath of the trials and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde. The fictionalized characters--John and Henry, and their wives Catherine and Edith--are brought to vivid life by Crewe, who writes about their social, intellectual and erotic lives with extraordinary verisimilitude. Wonderfully precise about things that themselves do not always seem appropriate to precision, the novel considers the similarities between desire and intellectual life, which both risk producing things that may ultimately prove abortive or bathetic. Crewe stays brilliantly faithful to the language, the outlook and the conventions of 1890s London even as he shows, and investigates, the distance between then and now. With compassion, lucidity and poise he explores both the creation of new sexual identities and the nature of social activism, as the ideals of liberation tangle with shame, fear and doubt.” 

The Orwell Prize for Political Writing went to Peter Apps for Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen. The judges called it a "magnificent book that deftly combines vivid, compelling accounts of the victims of the fire with forensic (but no less engaging) detail on the decades of politics and policy which led up to it. Expect to find yourself crying over details of building regulations you never knew existed--and over the fact that so many of us let shifts in such regulations go unnoticed, to such devastating impact. Show Me the Bodies has the values of the Orwell Prize at its core: it is beautiful writing about a devastating subject that we should all understand."

Both winners receive £3,000 (about $3,815). 

A well-read feminist reviewer of a certain age who encounters Stuff Mom Never Told You: The Feminist Past, Present, and Future may find herself sheepishly wondering: How much can she learn about feminism from a couple of young women? Answer: lots, if those women are Anney Reese and Samantha McVey, cohosts of iHeartMedia's intersectional feminism-minded podcast Stuff Mom Never Told You. Their book of this name is as elucidating as it is galvanizing.

In their authors' note, Reese and McVey say that the decade-old podcast (of which they aren't the original hosts) began "with the goal of examining everything and anything through a feminist lens," and their book shares this mission statement. It's a feminist smorgasbord in six themed chapters: on women in sports, on reproductive rights, and so on. As with any smorgasbord, there's a range of textures and tastes: each chapter features a condensed graphic novel illustrated by Helen Choi that introduces the topic at hand; a fictional cautionary tale that hypothesizes what would have happened if progress (Roe v. Wade, gay marriage) had been thwarted; and straight-up reporting on how progress was made.

If the book's clustered mini-profiles of activists representing a range of social justice movements come across as the smorgasbord's nutritive but unexciting vegetables, other sections are dessert: there are pop culture riffs, a crossword puzzle about disability rights, etc. As for things not clocked by even a seasoned feminist: Who knew that women are bigger consumers of horror than men are? And that Hugh Hefner's Playboy Foundation funded the first 10,000 rape kits?

The most powerful moments in Stuff Mom Never Told You are found in the book's "journal entry" sections, in which Reese and McVey grapple with their place in the world. (Each author's personal take is distinguished by a thumbnail of her Funko toy-style likeness.)

There's also commentary via occasional capsule-size outbursts, such as when Reese writes: "I maintain that while I'm not condoning the violent, vengeful actions of the character Ellie in The Last of Us Part II, I feel very strongly a male character doing the same thing would not have attracted the same vitriol." With its breezy tone and Feminism 101-heavy content, Stuff Mom Never Told You is a fine entry point for newbie feminists and feminism-curious young adults. For older feminists, the book offers some new info and the reassurance that there are righteous young women out there flying the flag high. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Shelf Talker: This book, from the cohosts of the intersectional feminism-minded podcast of the same name, is a fine entry point for newbie feminists, but it has wisdom to impart to more seasoned feminists as well.

The bestselling self-published books last week as compiled by IndieReader.com:

1. Magic Claims by Ilona Andrews
2. Perfect Together by Kristen Ashley
3. Never Lie by Freida McFadden
4. Reckless by Elsie Silver
5. The Unwanted Marriage by Catharina Maura
6. The Ritual by Shantel Tessier
7. Pucking Around by Emily Rath
8. Haunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton
9. Double Pucked by Lauren Blakely
10. Death's Obsession by Avina St. Graves

[Many thanks to IndieReader.com!]