ALA 2010

I’m preparing today to leave the sweltering, muggy weather of Brooklyn, New York to attend the American Library Association Annual Conference in the sweltering, muggy weather of Washington, D.C. (I learned something about library budgets years ago when I realized that the January conferences are always in places like Boston and Chicago, and the July conferences are always in places like Washington, D.C. or Anaheim, CA.) I’ll be signing Moonshot at the Simon & Schuster booth on Sunday, from 1:00 to 2:00, and advance copies of Ballet for Martha at the Macmillan booth on Monday, from 12:30 to 1:00. And on Monday morning, I’ll be happy and honored to receive a Sibert Honor Award for Moonshot. I’m looking forward to seeing old and new friends and to a weekend full of librarians, authors, illustrators, editors, publishers, and books. If you’re going to be in D.C., I hope I’ll see you there!

Prêt-à-Porter

Over the years I’ve done much schooling and living in (as Paul Simon sings it) New England, sweet New England. Not until last summer, though, did I make it to Martha’s Vineyard. Once there, one conversation led to another, and I’ve just now finished a small drawing for the Aquinnah Public Library’s summer reading program t-shirts. A cleaner, inked version of this pencil sketch will be used on the shirts, but I still like the pencil and so here it is. The library will be selling the shirts soon, so the only question now is how big of a bite they’ll take out of the island’s omnipresent Black Dog merchandising empire. If the shirts are a hit and the library branches out into tote bags, footwear, housewares, biscotti, and hot sauce, don’t blame me.