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April 12, 2022Read an Excerpt from Caroline van Rooyen's Any Girl, About a Teen Survivor Hunting Down a Predator
Content warning: sexual violenceCaroline van Rooyen's Any Girl (Mawenzi House) is the harrowing, fiery story of July, the unlikely 15-year old heroine who wages war on a rapist terrorizing her community ...
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March 24, 2020Dirty Dozen: Jane Munro Talks Teenage Jobs, Her First Poem, and the Joys of the Upside-Down
Griffin Prize-winning poet Jane Munro's newest collection, Glass Float (Brick Books), is a study of boundaries and connections. The limit of the horizon, of a land-bound glass float, is used to illustrate ...
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February 21, 2022
*Well, excuuuse me, Princess
Welcome back, Open Book reader. Lovely to see you again, hope you’re doing well. As promised, I’m going to give some insight into what fuels all this nerdiness I’m brimming with. The relatively ...
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May 23, 2009
Teenagers with a Vision...
I enjoyed meeting Emil Sher and reading with him at Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People this morning. Folks visiting ranged in age from babies in buggies to ladies and gents with white hair. That’s ...
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December 11, 2018December Spotlight on Excerpts: Read About the Maple Leaf from Symbols of Canada
Symbols of Canada, edited by Michael Dawson, Catherine Gidney and Donald Wright (Between the Lines Books), delves into the titular symbols, whether they're as storied as Indigenous carvings or as ...
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May 16, 2020Readings...that feeling never goes away.
I always get that feeling right before reading my work in public. You may know it: the urge to simultaneously faint, throw up, and run out of the room. My first few readings were terrifying. I was fortunate ...
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December 09, 2015Kid Lit Can, with Susan Hughes: Spotlight on 3 Picture Book Creators (2016 Blue Spruce Award Nominees), (Part 2)
Welcome! Today I continue my chat with the three accomplished creators whose picture books have been nominated for the Ontario Library Association 2016 Blue Spruce Award: Sangeeta Bhadra, Elly MacKay ...
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October 23, 2018Bad Reviews and Broken Hearts: How to Deal with All the Feelings
First: Spend several years working on you—I mean, a manuscript. Revise each draft based on feedback from your therapist—I mean, editor. Get Tinder—I mean, get publishing deal. Agonize over each ...
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December 23, 2019How You Get Paid Writing Children’s Books or: Math is Fun!
One question I rarely get asked is how you get paid when you write and/or illustrate children’s books. I know people have a lot of questions regarding how much they might get paid, but how does the ...
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December 22, 2023Book Therapy: Favourites From My Favourites
“My eclectic reading habits often lead me through various genres, from memoirs and horror novels to young adult fiction and anything else that I happen to grab. However, I have a particular fondness ...
