This book banning bill is absolutely horrific: www.ala.org/news/2026/02.... Please contact your legislators and speak out against this massive blow to children's literature. #MgLit #KidLit #ChildrensFiction
It was so much fun to write, such a wonderful respite from a challenging world.
Thank you, my friend! I can't wait to share more about it!
Thank you, my friend! It's so thrilling for me to finally have another book coming out!
Thank you so much! I hope kids enjoy reading the dragon-sport scenes as much as I enjoyed writing them!
Thank you! I can hardly believe that this story will (relatively) soon be a book!
Aww, thank you so much!
Publishers Marketplace Deal Report: Skyward by Diane Magras, Imprint: Scholastic. Diane Magras's SKYWARD, in which a 13-year-old, desperate for acceptance to the Junior Division of a competitive sport on dragonback, must win over the dragon she's paired with or see her dream fizzle, to Jennifer Thompson at Scholastic, for publication in 2028, by Sara Megibow at Megibow Literary Agency (world). sara@megibowliterary.com. Children's: Middle Grade Fiction, February 10, 2026
I've had to keep this secret for a bit, but here's something I've been working on!
This story was a blast to write. I can't wait for you all to meet the characters (including, of course, plenty of dragons!).
#MGLit #KidLit
He did want Turkish Delight and to be a prince (and later a king) and to pay Peter out for calling him a beast. As for what the Witch would do with the others, he didn't want her to be particularly nice to them - certainly not to put them on the same level as himself; but he managed to believe, or to pretend he believed, that she wouldn't do anything very bad to them, 'Because,' he said to himself, 'all these people who say nasty things about her are her enemies and probably half of it isn't true. She was jolly nice to me, anyway, much nicer than they are. I expect she is the rightful Queen really. Anyway, she'll be better than that awful Aslan!' At least, that was the excuse he made in his own mind for what he was doing. It wasn't a very good excuse, however, for deep down inside him he really knew that the White Witch was bad and cruel.
Ok, did not expect “The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe” to feel quite so relevant to this moment.
Here’s Edmund, deciding to side with the leader who he’s been told disappears people.
I love seeing this quote because we're in a world where we need to remember this. We all have the potential of being good at what needs to be done to help our world be a better place. I haven't gone back and read this book for a long while, but I'm wondering now if it's even more relevant to today.
Every once in a while, I get a Google Alert on one of my past books. this time, it was this amazing video by a young fan. To know that my work is still reaching its readers in this way is so fulfilling. (And what a great vid, too!)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEk2...
#MGLit #MiddleGradeBooks
This is definitely a stellar MG to get lost in. The moral questions are fantastic, and the characters vivid and wonderful. I hope you enjoy it!
I had so much fun reading the ARC of @sarahjmendonca.bsky.social's wonderful debut, and gobbled it up yet again when it came out! So it's out, and here's my review. (And librarians and teachers: This is one that will fly off your shelves!) #MGLit #KidLit
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
I have always been a huge fan of those medieval scribes' wonderful imaginations.
www.openculture.com/2025/08/why-...
What questions should writers ask? Katherine Rundell nails it in @thetls.bsky.social
Happy #BookBirthday to @amybmucha.bsky.social for her absolutely delightful new #mglit GEO'S FORTUNE, about friendship, predictions, truth, and magic in a realistic world of cool natural stones.
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/777234...
Children’s Africana book Award honor chapter book Kingdom of Dust The Smoke That Thunders Flying Through Water
KINGDOM OF DUST is a 2025 Children’s Africana Book Award honoree! I had no idea!
I’m thrilled that the committee felt my West African-inspired fantasy honored and respected Nigerian culture. 🙏🏾📚
cfas.howard.edu/outreach/cab... #CABAbooks @harperkids.bsky.social #QuillTreeBooks
So many congrats!!!
My immediately family has no plans. We'd love to go on a lovely little vacation, but it's not worth the risk.
So true. It's reached the point where I am seriously afraid of flying.
And I'm grateful that she continues to be my companion for both my author job and my day job. She's been on my lap for nearly every Zoom presentation or meeting, sometimes showing her face, but often just purring quietly while I do my work and, of course, stroke that very soft and lovely ruff.
And I think how wonderful it's been for my little boy to grow up with this very sweet cat. He was in 4th grade when we lost our first cat (to FIP), which was heartbreaking. I'm so glad that he's had the chance to enjoy the quiet independent companionship that a wonderful cat will give.
But I also think about these past ten years and how often we've been in the same room together, three introverts doing our own thing, with Flora sleeping on one lap, then another, then playing with one of us, then climbing "Mount Mommy," as my son called it when he was small.
I think of that often, how kind her foster owner was, but also how that foster owner had been tempted to keep her. I'm glad she let Flora go to us. For one, I suspect she'd have had trouble in a house with that many other cats. For another, she adores fish and can only take a little bit of chicken.
When we first met her, she was a friendly but wary young mother (somehow, only 7 months old or so) who had been abandoned as a pregnant cat in TN. She was living with a very kind foster owner who had three or four other cats, in a chicken-only house due to one cat's allergies to fish.
A brown tabby cat with a ruff sits in a contemplative pose, tail curved around her, on a rust-colored throw with a window to one side and the start of a stairway and a doorway behind.
On Wednesday, Flora will have been part of our family, the sole cat in this house, and beloved companion of her three human subjects, for ten years. And as you can see, she has not lost a wisp of her grace and beauty.
A beautiful summary of David Attenborough's favorite ocean experiences: "Young children playing on a beach today will live through perhaps the most consequential time for the human species in the past 10,000 years. They will grow up to see how this story ends…"
www.thetimes.com/life-style/c...
So agree. This is one of my favorite novels ever.
Title: The Comprehensive Bookshop Image: an enormous, low building fills the frame, running almost to the horizon in a featureless desert. Captions: A ceaseless stream of delivery trucks flows from publishers' warehouses to an ever-expanding building out in the desert. Within, hundreds of miles of shelving hold copies of every book ever published. Customers arrive with authors or genres in mind, but the near infinite choice and maze of passages soon overwhelm them. Cars decay in the parking lot as their owners browse for months on end. The bedraggled figures who occasionally stagger from the exit are taken to a nearby hospital, but upon recovering, inevitably "Just pop back to grab a few more books."
‘The Comprehensive Bookshop” - my cartoon for this week’s @theguardian.com books.
A starred Kirkus review for a fantastic monster-filled #MGlit heist! Check this out, friends, for another amazing book for classrooms, libraries, and kids' hands (Out on July 8, 2025): www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews...