Floral garden finds in May

Simple neuroscience-based hack for anxiety:
🌿go & be in a place with plants & trees for 15 mins
🌳You'll inhale plant oils(phytoncides) from foliage
📉your stress hormone(cortisol) will drop significantly

Many of our brain pathways evolved to motivate us to forage for plants-they're still very active

The US is undergoing the worst self-inflicted destruction of health, education, and knowledge creation infrastructure since the great leap forward. We will all be substantially less educated, poorer, and sicker while millions will die from completely preventable causes. It's civilizational suicide.

It’s still hard to believe the simple fact that this is all self-imposed. Everything that’s happening right now wasn’t the result of some foreign adversary destroying the country. We did this all to ourselves by electing the dumbest motherfucker to ever rule a nation.

Please help boost this -

Most of you know about my situation, and I'm sad to see how common this is, but so heartened that the kidlit community is coming together.

Hey everyone -- Moms of Liberty and Dept of Education launched a snitch line portal today to rat out teachers and anyone promoting anything DEI.

FLOOD THE PORTAL

Spam the hell out of it.

Pass it on! It works!

enddei.ed.gov

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

from “Parable of the Talents” by Octavia Butler

Here's how you can find all your federal and state elected representatives--including governor and state reps/senators. For city, google your city + "city council" or look on your city's official page. (Shy-person script in next post.)
www.commoncause.org/find-your-re...

Thank you, Will!!

YAY @aidawrites.bsky.social !!!!

Still in shock about the Pura Belpre honor for Ultraviolet. The librarians on the committee really took a chance on a controversial book. 🥹 This is what resistance also looks like. ✊🏽

I'm donating my large collection of diverse middle grade and picture books to two schools that were lost in the LA fires. Anyone in the SF Bay driving down that can deliver them?

Hello #booksky and #activistsky! Where are the revolutionaries on this app?

This week, Grizzly readers selected their new Dive In book for our Verse Unit after days of book tastings! 🐻📚 @authorlisafipps.bsky.social @aidawrites.bsky.social #VerseNovels #204Reads

Beautiful work!

A call to action: Our organizing sister Danielle Monique has posted this brave and insightful essay on her experience working at the Society of Childrens Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). We salute her courage and honesty. KEY POINTS INCLUDE: —SCBWI leadership planned to put out a post supporting Israel as it was committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. —After Daniel Monqiue spoke about this and other forms of zionism and racism at the org, SCBWI fired her for “insubordination.” — The CA Civil Rights Board has opened a case on SCBWI related to this

While this is not a call for a full boycott of SCBWI, we urge members of the kid lit community to consider how we use our platforms, who we uplift, what messages we're sending with our words and actions. SPEAK OUT! Over a year ago the children of Gaza held a press conference to beg the world to stop the genocide against them. The world, including SCBWI and PEN America, ignored them. But we don't have to. SPEAK OUT!

We believe the kid lit community needs to have an open, honest dialogue about organizations that represent us openly supporting genocide, including the murder of tens of thousands of children, and internally punishing pro-Palestinian voices. We cannot claim to be on the side of humanity, or children, or freedom, on the one hand and support all the opposite things with our actions. When we continue to invest our energy, time, money, creativity, and names to organizations that support genocide, we deepen our own complicity and help whitewash the ongoing atrocities

We believe we can do better, as authors, illustrators, readers, publishers, a community, we can do better. We can choose where we give our resources, how we speak out, how we respond to silence and silencing.

The Society of Childrens Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) planned to put out a statement supporting Israel while it commits genocide. Danielle Monique spoke up and was fired for insubordination. We have to do better in the kid lit community.