Jessica Young’s latest picture book, I’ll Meet You in Your Dreams, celebrates the parent-child bond, while simultaneously honoring children’s need to spread their wings. Young and illustrator Rafael López will celebrate the launch of I’ll Meet You in Your Dreams at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on March 9.
In Ground Zero, possibly his most heart-wrenching middle-grade book yet, Knoxville native Alan Gratz weaves the terror of 9/11 and the pain of the ongoing war in Afghanistan into a story whose relentless pace and nonstop suspense ensure readers feel every bit of it. Gratz will discuss Ground Zero at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 12.
Knoxville native Alan Gratz takes on tough subjects in his fiction for young readers, as in his 2019 novel, Allies, set during World War II. Resist, a companion novella to Allies, will be released as an ebook and audiobook in September. In response to our Glorious Pastime questionnaire, Gratz tells Chapter 16 what he’s been reading lately and recommends an underappreciated book series.
In an interview conducted prior to her visit to the 2018 Southern Festival of Books, The Honorable Sonia Sotomayor, an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, discussed her books for young readers, Turning Pages: My Life Story and The Beloved World of Sonia Sotomayor.
In this 2013 interview, artist and author Gene Luen Yang discusses the evolution of the graphic novel. Yang’s own autobiographical book, American Born Chinese, was the first graphic novel nominated for a National Book Award and the first to win the American Library Association’s Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in young-adult literature.
In Greg Howard’s second middle-grade novel, Middle School’s a Drag: You Better Werk!, entrepreneurial pre-teen Mikey Pruitt thinks his new talent agency can’t miss, now that he’s representing an eighth-grade aspiring drag queen. Readers won’t be surprised to find out that things don’t go as smoothly as Mikey anticipates. Howard will discuss the book at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 11, at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on February 13, and at the SE-YA Book Fest in Murfreesboro on March 12-14.
