Children & YA | Chapter 16

The Prize in the Cereal Box

A Nashville nanny enters a Cheerios contest … and wins a publishing contract

By Margaret Renkl | October 19, 2009

Nashville nanny Shellie Braeuner didn’t learn about the first Cheerios Spoonfuls of Stories Children’s Book Contest until the final day to enter. Undaunted, she came up with a charming rhyme about bathing the family dog and entered the contest online, barely in time to pick up the older children from school. Despite a typo in the title, The Great Dog Wash beat out a thousand other entries to win the grand prize—five thousand dollars and the chance at a hardcover publishing contract.

Fireworks, at Home and Elsewhere

In his new YA novel, Silas House explores post-Vietnam tensions and summertime self discovery

By Susannah Felts | October 7, 2009

Today’s young readers, coming of age in a post-9/11 world, should be deeply familiar with a central question of our times: what does it mean to be patriotic, to love—and protect, or protest—one’s country? It’s one question, among others, that they’ll find tenderly explored in Silas House‘s first young-adult novel, Eli the Good.

Voices of Stone

Poetic interpretations of a master sculptor’s work

By Maria Browning | October 2, 2009

Nashville sculptor William Edmondson believed he worked at God’s command. In a collection of poems for young readers, Elizabeth Spires gives his creations voices of their own.

Hot Popcorn, Cold War

Ronald Kidd’s new Young Adult novel takes kids to the movies during the red scare

By Chris Scott | September 14, 2009

The 1950s was a scary time, full of drop drills, McCarthyism, and Soviet boasts. It was also the golden age of horror movies. Aliens, mutants, zombies, and werewolves filled theater screens. Coincidence? Not in Ronald Kidd‘s The Year of the Bomb, a young-adult novel that explores the angst of growing up surrounded by real and imagined horror.

Be Not Afraid of My Body: A Lyrical Memoir

Darius Stewart
Belt Publishing
276 pages
$19.99

“Through a mix of straightforward memoir, brilliantly surreal reveries, and moments of startling imagery and insight, Stewart’s explorations of love, illness, chemical dependency, desire, family, joy, shame, loneliness, and beauty coalesce into a wrenching, musical whole.”

~the publisher