Our 175 year old Peterborough Town Library had a fun event a few days ago to celebrate Beth Krommes, the 2009 Randolph Caldecott Medal winner. Beth is a good friend of ours and lives in Peterborough, just down the road from us. She and Lita usually drive together to our two annual southern NH children’s book events: The Keene Children Literature Festival and the SCBWI Nashua Conference. (This year they’re both featured speakers at the Keene Festival.)

The House in the Night is such a beautiful book—here’s our new copy with the Caldecott sticker:

I spent most of the night talking with Beth’s husband, Dave, about software and websites and blogs. Dave designed Beth’s new site last summer.

We’re looking forward to Beth’s ALA speech—I’ve heard it may have some reference to the ice storm and 10 day power outage we experienced in Peterborough in December. Lita will be at the ALA conference this summer …

but we’re not sure if she’ll be able to attend the awards ceremony.

Originally published at Adventures at Wilder Farm. You can comment here or there.

We’ve recently discovered a very nicely done website that is about books for young readers with a special focus on the Pacific Rim and South Asia. But this month they feature several articles on the themes of “war, peace and social justice” in relation to children’s books. And they’ve included an article written by Lita!

In the introduction to the articles they ask, “How can we help children to cope with the divisiveness and contradictions at play in the world today? And how can we help them to feel that they have the power to change things for the better?… At no other time in recent history have these themes been more relevant or their challenges more urgent than they are now. ”

Here are links to the articles:

Books for Thought and Action: A Taste of Jane Addams’ Legacy
by Jo Montie

Learning That War Is Not a Game
by Kathy Beckwith

Finding One Thousand Tracings
by Lita Judge (reprinted with permission)

… and from the PaperTiger archives: Strengthening the Good, Stamping Out the Bad: Children’s Books & Good Causes

They also have a blog here so please take a look.

Originally published at Adventures at Wilder Farm. You can comment here or there.

The next book out for Lita is Mogo, The Third Warthog, written by Donna Jo Napoli. This is Lita’s second project with Donna Jo. Here’s an image of the book jacket for Mogo:

And a closeup of Mogo—he’s a likable looking warthog, isn’t he?

The scheduled on sale date is July 1st.

Lita’s first book book with Donna Jo—Ugly—is coming out in paperback at about the same time. The cover for Ugly has been redesigned. It used to look like this:

But now will look something like this:

This last image is just a mock-up. I’ll miss the ducklings in the lower left, but I like the blue sky and the new title font!

Originally published at Adventures at Wilder Farm. You can comment here or there.