Every book deserves a bookmark. And creating your own signature design is a fun and easy DIY book craft that doesn’t require tons of materials or cleanup! Just like children often eat more vegetables when they help prepare a meal, kids can feel more invested in books when they personalize them with special bookmarks all their own.
Try this quick craft project, inspired by Somewhat Simple, to engage your kids with the titles on their bookshelves. A custom bookmark with a shiny ribbon might be just the thing to encourage them to crack open that new book. Of course, a great story’s your best bet to keep the pages turning once they do.
MATERIALS:
- Scrapbook paper or other patterned paper (or paint or color your own)
- Old book or magazine pages
- Scissors
- Glue stick
- Fun ribbon
- Standard round hole punch
- Optional: Craft punches (I used a star and heart shape, but there are endless choices!)
A Word on Book Page Crafts
You need to cut up pages of print for this DIY craft. As a book lover, I understand that cutting up a book can feel wrong. But I celebrate the idea of upcycling truly outdated and obsolete books to give them a second life and fresh purpose. Outdated law, science, or medical texts and irreparably damaged books of all kinds are great candidates for upcycling—guilt free.
Now, let’s begin!
STEPS
1. Pick fun, bright paper for your designs! Let kids choose their own paper to get them engaged in the activity. You can also use cardstock craft paper for sturdier bookmarks. If you don’t have any scrapbook paper or patterned cardstock lying around, take this craft to the next level by coloring or painting a pattern on plain paper.
2. Cut your scrapbook paper and book or magazine pages to the size you want for your bookmark. I traced a small box, but you could use a ruler instead, or trace a bookmark you already have. Cut two pieces of your scrapbook paper and one piece of the book/magazine for each bookmark.
3. Use decorative punches if you have them, or a regular hole punch, to punch out a design on one of the pieces of your patterned scrapbook paper. Get creative! The best surprise is what your pattern looks like with your book page behind it.
4. Put glue all over the backside of your punched scrapbook paper, then place it on top of your book or magazine page. Press firmly to secure. Put a generous amount of glue on your other piece of scrapbook paper and press to the backside of your bookmark.
5. Add a small hole with your regular hole punch at the top of your bookmark. Loop some ribbon through, tie it off, and you’re done!
Now you and your children have beautiful bookmarks to hold your spot as you read.
This DIY bookmark craft is as versatile as it is easy, and there are endless ways to use the bookmarks you create. Think inexpensive favors for a birthday party, shower, or wedding—or gift tags during the holidays. So many possibilities!
Will you try this DIY book craft with your kids? Let us know what you think!
Kelsey Nickerson creates abstract paintings with rich color, texture, and movement, and enjoys a good book craft. She oversees web production and photography for MayaSmart.com.
When people ask what my favorite book is, I always respond with Jacqueline Woodson’s 2012 picture book Each Kindness. But truth be told, everything she writes, from picture book to poetry to novel, is wonderful. Each new work prompts me to consider central questions of who we are, why we are, and how we can grow for the better. And, because I adore her writing and her advocacy for reading, I interview her every chance I get.
Here’s an excerpt from our October conversation about her novel Red at the Bone for BookPeople in Austin. We discussed how to write memorably, build authorial confidence, and address different audiences. Her words inspire me to write more, and more bravely.
Your writing has a certain velocity to it. In Red at the Bone, you jump right into the story and move from moment to moment. You go back and forth in time, incorporating characters who are in the moment but also in memories. What gives you the confidence to leave out the adjectives, strict chronology, and detailed descriptions?
I think poetry gives me a lot of confidence—reading poetry and seeing the chances that poets take with their writing. Having written 31 books gives me a lot of confidence, knowing that I can kind of take these chances in my writing. Also, wanting to create a new narrative and not tell the same old story the same old way again [gives me confidence], mainly because I get bored. If I’m writing and I’m feeling bored writing, I know that writing is boring.
One thing about time is no one ever comes into someone’s life at the beginning of it. It’s the beginning of a relationship, but it’s not the beginning of that life. When I was thinking about the whole intersectionality of the characters, I had to look at the beginnings and the endings and the middles of their lives and write accordingly. And so I wasn’t going to write Chapter One, this happened, Chapter Two, Chapter Three. I had to go back and forth in time to tell this story.
At the start of the book, when Melody is being presented to society, she has chosen a questionable version of Prince’s “Darling Nikki” as the music to accompany her grand entrance. The original song is so raw and percussive. There’s a lot of screaming and grunting and all this stuff going on. But on this occasion, it’s a wordless cello, harmonica, and bassoon rendition. You can just imagine that remix of the ritual. So tell us a bit about that music choice and that character’s debut.
So, we’re in 21st century Brooklyn, and here is this stuff from the early 1900’s that they’re asking her to pay homage to. And she’s a teenager. Having a teenager of my own, I know they are constantly pushing against those boundaries. So I asked myself, how would this character push against this boundary? And, of course, “Darling Nikki.” I knew a girl named Nikki, I guess you could say she was a sex fiend, I met her at a hotel lobby, masturbating with a magazine, are the opening lyrics of this song.
She has this huge fight with her mother about that song. It is about her having agency, her saying, yes, I am part of this narrative, but I am also my own person and I’m going to do stuff differently, and Prince just worked.
The book opens with Melody turning 16. Other scenes reflect on her parents’ teen years, yet Red at the Bone was written for adult readers. How do you decide, as a writer, this one is for adult readers, this one is for young readers?
One of the things with young adult literature is the character tends to stay the same age, and it’s from their point of view. [In Red at the Bone,] some of the points of view are adults and some of them young adults. I don’t curse in my young adult books and my children’s books and I curse a lot in this book. There’s not any sex in my young adult or children’s books and there’s that in this. That’s not to say that there aren’t young adult or children’s books that have sex and cursing in them, it’s just my personal choice not to do that.
One other thing that feels very adult to me is the way I move through time. I do think a younger reader would have a hard time following that because it comes from a place of experience that I think happens when we’re a little bit older. We know that life is tangential, right? We go off on tangents and then we will return to a place. But [when writing] for young people, I tend toward a more straight narrative.
Do you approach writing a picture book, a middle grade, a young adult, an adult project differently?
Yeah. Whenever I do a picture book, it’s like I’m writing a poem. I’m very intentional about the line breaks. Look at something like The Other Side:
That summer the fence that stretched through our town seem bigger. Line break. We lived in the yellow house on one side of it. Line break. White people lived on the other. Line break. Momma said don’t climb over that fence when you play. Line break. She said it wasn’t safe.
So each line offers a picture into the world that moves the reader along the page. And then by the time you get to “She said it was a mistake,” the reader wants to turn the page to find out what was a mistake, right? You want to constantly have the reader turning the page. Really young kids don’t have a long attention span and if you don’t deliver with that first line, you’ve lost them. You know, they’re done, they’re like, “This is a wrap—where is the next book that’s going to entertain me?” And I have a deep respect for that.
When I’m writing for middle graders, it’s much more immediate. When you look at something like Harbor Me, I’m writing in the face and in the conversation and in the world. With young adults, it’s a bigger canvas and they can assume more, they’re kind of meeting me from their experience a little more, so I can imply more.
And then, of course, when you get to adults, the reader is bringing a lot more of their own experience to the narrative. So the tone is different, too.
And are you able to work in all the different spaces simultaneously?
Yeah, I just finished a picture book and I’m working on a middle grade book. When I was writing Red as a Bone, I was also working on Harbor Me and The Day You Begin, so I’m all over the place.
As the Library of Congress’s 2018-2019 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, you had a slogan: Reading = Hope x Change. Do you have the same sense of mission for your books?
I do believe that when we read it gives us hope. I learned that directly through young people. You can write a book that doesn’t necessarily have a happy ending, but as long as there’s hope somewhere in the book, you’ve done your work.
I feel like I’ve also brought that to my adult novels. That hope has to be there. If we didn’t have it, we wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning. And I do think that when we read a book that we really love and deeply engage in, it changes us. We’re a different person when we close that book than when we opened it. We’ve gotten into a different world. We learned something we didn’t know about people we didn’t know. Our empathy has grown.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Recommended Viewing
Jessica “Culture Queen” Hebron is on a mission to make Kwanzaa fun, enticing, and effortless for families to celebrate. “We have several different black people holidays, but this is the big one,” she explains. “I think it’s really cool that black people have something just for them that lasts seven days, helps you to align yourself culturally, and gives you like a cultural sense of self.”
She believes that the keys to bolstering participation in the holiday she loves are to start slow and focus on the fundamentals. Kwanzaa’s Swahili language, formal table setting, and candle lighting ritual can intimidate newcomers, so she recommends that people of all ages learn about the holiday through picture books. The illustrations, examples, and simple wording make the holiday accessible and engaging. “Once you’re interested in it, then you’ll go and read all the heavy material,” she says.
Above all, the holiday affirms cultural pride and solidarity. “If you’re trying to find yourself and you’re trying to figure out what it means to be black and American or African American, these are very uplifting, positive, universal principles that you can try to follow and align your life with to give yourself self-empowerment,” she explains. “When I was a kid, I just liked anything that made me feel black and proud. And every year, the thing that keeps me celebrating Kwanzaa is to help to teach other people who might have misconceptions about it.”
Here are five picture books Culture Queen recommends. Each shows families living the seven principles of Kwanzaa: Umoja (Unity), Kujichagulia (Self-determination), Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility), Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics), Nia (Purpose), Kuumba (Creativity), and Imani (Faith).
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Culture Queen Resources
In December 2014, I attended a Kwanzaa workshop at Central Montessori School in Richmond, Virginia, that continues to resonate, across years and miles. The speaker was Kwanzaa educator Jessica “Culture Queen” Hebron, and her celebration—culturally rooted, historically aware, hands-on, and high-energy—introduced Kwanzaa to my toddler daughter in grand fashion. She transformed the gathering space with an ornate Kwanzaa table and song, dance, crafts, and stories that kept families engaged from beginning to end.
Culture Queen’s hallmark is crafting experiences that leave kids humming with positivity and enthusiasm for themselves and African American culture. Her method builds self-esteem through repetition and affirmation; her multisensory engagement immerses kids in a world of color, sound, movement, and excitement. She stimulates young minds through the body, then uses stories and activities to make important cultural and historical lessons stick.
Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with her about her own formative Kwanzaa experiences and how we parents can introduce or elevate the holiday in our own homes this holiday season. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation.
What’s your first Kwanzaa memory?
Well, the very first one was with a family friend named Njambi. She was our aunt’s best friend, and she was very Afrocentric. She invited us to a celebration in someone’s home and I didn’t understand what was going on at the time; I just knew that there was a lot of stuff about Africa and there was music and drumming and dancing and great food. And I remember liking it because I loved everything she did, because she was like a cultural fairy godmother.
My first official Kwanzaa celebration was with Jack and Jill and it was in the early nineties. I was probably in second grade—I have the picture from it. My mom dressed my sister and me in matching African outfits and I remember the whole room being decorated with red, black and green balloons and streamers. And, you know, I remember the parents of my friends working together to create the ceremony and to educate us. It was great. Since then I’ve been to many more and facilitated many more, but I have the picture from my first, so it’s kind of cool to see that I still do it now.
What’s kept you celebrating it all these years?
Most holidays that we have are so old. You might know the origins from looking them up, but you really can’t pinpoint a founder. So the founder of Kwanzaa is still alive. I’ve met him several times and he’s aware of my work. Kwanzaa is only 53 years old.
It’s not our only African American holiday, but it’s our only African American holiday that lasts seven days. This is the big one. I think it’s really cool that black people have something just for them that lasts seven days, helps you to align yourself culturally, and gives you a cultural sense of self.
If you’re trying to find yourself and you’re trying to figure out what it means to be black and American or African American, [Kwanzaa celebrates] very uplifting, positive, universal principles that you can try to follow and align your life with to give yourself self-empowerment. When I was a kid, I didn’t know that I would take such a liking to it, but I just liked anything that made me feel black and proud.
Every year, the thing that keeps me celebrating Kwanzaa is to help to teach other people who might have misconceptions about it. I try to make the celebration seem so fun and enticing that it’s effortless for them to celebrate and they see how easy it is to incorporate it into their holiday traditions.
How do you think your own celebration of Kwanzaa has evolved over time as you’ve gained experience with the ceremony and have performed it yourself and participated in different versions of it over time?
It’s always a creative challenge to see how do I keep it fresh for the year and every year. Even though I try to have some things that I do every single year, I always try to challenge myself to do one thing differently.
[The first] year I had my sister, who’s an architect and interior designer, design me a really giant kinara, the Kwanzaa candle holder…When I’m doing big events, I want people to be able to see it because I’m teaching from it. The prop didn’t hold up too well after so many programs, so for the second year, she designed it out of wood, and that was amazing. The third year I asked her could we make the candles flameless LED candles so I could let the kids have the experience of lighting the candles without us having to do fire. In this 10th year, I actually had my logo engraved on all of the Kwanzaa kinaras. I also had a collapsible Kwanzaa set designed so that when I’m traveling on a plane or going from place to place I can lift it.
For me, it’s about how do I use ingenuity to make Kwanzaa engaging. There is a competition with Christmas, I have to admit. Christmas is glittery. It’s sparkling. It’s a big holiday and full of decorations. So what I try to do is not compare Kwanzaa to Christmas, but to give it the same magic as Christmas. I really try to make the activities, the music, and the decorations super eye- catching and exciting so that it appeals to children. Every year I have a challenge: How do I recreate this Kwanzaaland so that people feel like they’re stepping into a world?
How do you keep learning and deepening your own understanding of Kwanzaa?
I always go back to the Kwanzaa founder Dr. Maulana Karenga’s book on Kwanzaa and the official Kwanzaa website. It’s interesting, I’ve found that some adults that started celebrating Kwanzaa when it first came out do it differently. They have their own way.
I think the main thing for me is trying to keep the integrity of Kwanzaa like people would keep the integrity of other holidays. That’s one thing that honestly irks me. When I see a holiday celebration that celebrates everything but Kwanzaa or the care that was taken to have the Christmas tree and the care that was taken to have the menorah and then there’s not the same care for the Kwanzaa display. That really bothers me because there’s just no excuse with the internet and Amazon Prime.
Do you think Kwanzaa is growing in popularity or declining in popularity?
I think Kwanzaa is growing. I think that it’s promising. I don’t think it’s going anywhere. And I think actually the political climate that we have with Donald Trump and all that’s happening [supports that]. I can’t remember who said this, but it was an African American writer who said something along the lines of, When we have racial injustice and political unrest in our culture, that’s the time when the best black art comes around and that’s the time when the best resistances to make change happen. So actually this political season that we’re in is even more reason why we should draw near to our cultural sense of self. I’m thinking that Kwanzaa will inspire parents more if they understand how easy it is to incorporate into their existing family traditions.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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Culture Queen Resources
Do you celebrate Kwanzaa? If so, how did you first learn about it and what keeps you celebrating it? If you don’t, why not?
Stay-at-home orders resulting from the new coronavirus have got many of us holed up inside 24/7 with kids and partners. All that togetherness can mean lots of quality time, if we make it that way. Luckily, books can be heroes every family needs to experience wonder, connection, and enjoyment during long days spent indoors.
Engaging texts keep independent readers happily occupied and create valuable time for parents to work, relax, or tackle household chores. Reading to yourself, reading aloud to kids, and encouraging kids to listen to recordings are great options for family reading time. For kids of all ages, reading together can bookend daily schedules to create relaxing rituals and a calming cadence to our days.
Here are three ways to boost book access and read more as a family during the pandemic:
1) Get digital library access. Visit your public library’s website to explore offerings for streaming or downloadable ebooks. Austin Public Library, for example, gives users access to OverDrive Kids, OverDrive Teens, TumbleBook Library, and MakeMake, a Spanish-language ebook source. Readers just need their library card number and password to log in via the web or a mobile device app. As with traditional library borrowing, there may be limited availability of individual titles and limits on how many books you can check out at once.
No library card? No problem. There are other ebook sources, such as Epic!, that you can sign up for directly. Epic! has an extensive collection of 40,000 ebooks, learning videos and quizzes for kids 12 and under. Free for elementary school teachers and librarians, the site costs $7.99 per month for parents, who can be assured that no ads or in-app purchases disrupt the reading immersion. Scribd offers a large ebook and audiobook library for adults and teens.
With so many ebooks at your fingertips, you can put kids’ I-don’t-have-anything-to-read complaints to bed immediately—and read more than you ever have before, yourself.
2) Listen up with audiobooks. Yes, audiobooks count as reading, so queue some up to enjoy together—and to wind down at the end of the day. Researchers, teachers, and librarians have all lauded audiobooks’ ability to engage even the most reluctant reader. A good story well narrated can boost oral language skills, vocabulary exposure, background knowledge, and reading comprehension. And audiobooks can be a great introduction to new-to-you cultures, ideas, and language traditions to boot. The format also allows families to experience multicultural content without stumbling over unfamiliar dialects or words.
Just as with ebooks, readers can check out audiobooks through public libraries that subscribe to OverDrive, Hoopla, and similar services. Libby, OverDrive’s much-loved app, delivers thousands of library-loaned ebooks and audiobooks directly to users’ phones or tablets. Librivox, another free audiobook option, offers public domain books read by volunteers. Little Women, anyone?
Vooks, an ad-free digital library, brings children’s picture books to life with music, professional narration, and eye-catching animation. It highlights each word in bold as it’s read by the narrator, making it a great option for young readers navigating text on their own and for parents who are unable to read aloud to children due to language or other barriers. Vooks offers a one-month free trial and then is $4.99/month.
Audible, Amazon’s audiobook division, is offering a limited selection of children’s content for free during coronavirus school closings. Kids can now stream stories, from fairytales and folktales to mystery and history, in six languages via desktop, laptop, phone, or tablet. Audible’s paid plans start at $14.95/month. Other paid audiobook subscription services include Audiobooks.com, Scribd, Kobo, and Downpour. Libro.fm stands apart by allowing you to buy great audiobooks from your local, independent bookseller. iTunes, Google Play, and Nook let you buy individual titles without a subscription.
3) Tune into virtual storytimes with authors. Kwame Alexander read from his book, The Crossover, on Instagram Live every day for a week. Author and illustrator Mo Willems does daily lunchtime doodles on YouTube thanks to a new Kennedy Center @ Home series. Oliver Jeffers captivated an audience of 267,000 followers by reading aloud on Instagram.
Author and celebrity-led storytimes are at an all-time high as people reach out across the social distance to bring kids and families joy. But how do you find them? There’s no comprehensive clearinghouse of online author appearances so your best bet is to follow your favorite authors and children’s book publishers on social media and keep an eye out for appearances in your feeds. Searching related hashtags like #operationstorytime and #stayathomestorytime is hit or miss.
It’s worth the effort to tune in when you can. A story read by its author often sparks greater reading interest and enthusiasm in kids long after the tale ends.
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I was late to embrace ebooks for kids. Convinced of the superiority of print books for young children, I joined multiple kids’ book-subscription programs and regularly stocked up on physical books at school book fairs, our local independent bookstore and public libraries to make it easy for my daughter to read more and more.
But the inflow of books dwindled during my daughter’s second-grade year, with the coronavirus pandemic and the stay-at-home orders that followed. Our local library system closed, our favorite bookstore shifted to curbside pickup and then halted in-person sales altogether, and we worried that book delivery by mail might be disrupted, too.
In need of fresh reading material for my daughter, I turned to Epic!, a kid-focused digital library that offers 40,000 ebooks, audiobooks, learning videos, and quizzes. It did not disappoint. Easy to use and ad-free, it creates a great immersive environment for children 12 and under to seek out fiction and nonfiction that interests them. It’s accessible through a web browser or mobile app, and costs just $7.99 per month after a 30-day free trial. You can create profiles for up to four children for at-home use.
Epic! quickly became my daughter’s go-to reading platform. Its interface was so appealing that she started searching for and reading books on Epic! even when her teacher had assigned the books from another digital library. Here’s why kids love Epic!:
- Freedom of choice. Kids read more in their
leisure time when they have access to a good selection of books and free rein
to decide what to read next. Epic! delivers both, allowing kids to navigate the
huge digital library on their own. They can scroll through titles by genre,
theme, series, awards, or popularity—or plug their own criteria into the search
bar for reads about a particular topic.
- Seamless experience. Epic! titles load quickly and there are no wait times in Epic!. When kids see a title, it’s available right away, unlike ebooks from libraries, which may have limits on how many users can access the material simultaneously. With no pop-up ads, banners, in-app purchases, or other intrusions, kids get to immerse themselves in books without distraction.
There’s a lot to love for parents too:
- Safe online environment. Epic! provides the book selection kids crave with the guardrails parents know they need. Made for kids exclusively, all of the content has been vetted for educational benefit and age appropriateness. Plus, there are no upsells, nor harmful personal data collection. Epic! is compliant with the Children’s Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
- Accurate reading-time tracking. Through the parent dashboard, moms and dads can take a peek at kids’ reading habits without being intrusive. The child’s profile shows which books the child has read, including how much time they spent, and on which date. This is a brilliant replacement for the much-maligned homework reading log, which studies have found to be demotivating to children, not to mention inaccurate and cumbersome.
- Affordability. For the price of one children’s paperback book, you can give your child access to 40,000 ebooks, audiobooks, and educational videos for a month. This expense easily fits within most family budgets and the return on investment in terms of educational impact and productive time will be well worth it.
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Emphatic and unsparing, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy explores the weight of wellness in a culture obsessed with lean. His expansive intelligence and fluid prose bear up to haunting family secrets and American deceptions with deep, potent wells of beauty, humor, and empathy.
Initially conceived as a weight-loss story chronicling his family’s struggles with food and violence, the writing of Heavy, which was recently named a finalist for the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, got murkier when relatives sidestepped his interview questions or lied altogether. “We’re a family, like most families, of addicts, but we never talked about the addiction,” he says. “We would talk about losing weight or gaining weight but we never talked about why. We never talked about particular memories around domestic, sexual, and racial violence.”
He became convinced that no one in his family wanted to reckon with the weight of where they had been or do the work of freeing themselves of it. “You need to keep that for your journal,” his mother would say of the revealing material he wished to mine for the book. “Nobody else needs to see that kind of writing.”
Click here to read the full post at KirkusReviews.com.
I would like to designate December National Quitting Awareness Month. After reading Seth Godin’s The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (And When to Stick), I’m fired up to pare down before the New Year.
The slim volume argues that quitting (despite its poor reputation) is a key to success. Quit fast. Quit often. Quit without guilt, Godin urges. Because quitting worthless pursuits gives you the time, energy, and focus to obsess about something that matters.
“Just about everything you learned in school about life is wrong, but the wrongest thing might very well be this: Being well rounded is the secret to success,” he writes. “In a free market, we reward the exceptional.” And the exceptional have learned to quit strategically.
Godin argues that when you trade busyness for obsession, you win. When you spot a dead end a mile away and reverse course, you win. Never underestimate the costs of staying stuck, he warns. Dead-ends are not neutral. Idling burns gas and keeps you from going somewhere exciting. Quitting unworthy projects, investments, and endeavors is the shortcut to success.
Most people quit reactively. “They quit when it’s painful and stick when they can’t be bothered to quit,” he writes. His advice? “The next time you catch yourself being average when you feel like quitting, realize that you have only two good choices: Quit or be exceptional. Average is for losers.”
The “dips” that the book’s title refer to are the exceptions to the quitting rule. Unlike dead ends, Godin’s dips are temporary. They’re the barriers that thwart most but reward those who tough it out. “Your marketplace is competitive, filled with people overcoming challenges every day,” Godin writes. “It’s the incredibly difficult challenges (the Dips) that give you the opportunity to pull ahead.”
He’s talking about entrepreneurship, but we can apply the insight to any period when our motivation is tested and our resources are stretched for our good. If excellence were easy, everyone would do it, and no one would profit, he insists.
Godin does advocate some quitting when laboring through a dip. Quit tactics, products, and features without hesitation while staying true to your market, he advises. The larger aim is to be a trusted source to a specific audience, not to foist an unwanted product on it. “Don’t fall in love with a tactic and defend it forever,” he writes. “Instead, decide once and for all whether you’re in a market or not. And if you are, get through that Dip.”
After reading The Dip, I’m examining all of my activities and deciding which are worthy of my time and talents. The resentment and fatigue that accompany some are sure signs that it’s time to move on. Cutting my losses, I now see, will give me the resources I need to tough out the dips in the commitments that matter. Why cope when you could quit? Why muddle along when you could push through?
Have you been stuck in a rut with work, personal, or volunteer projects this year? How do beliefs about quitting shape your decisions to continue or discontinue activities? Are some things easier for you to quit than others? If so, why?
Quote to Remember
“A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty thousand times on one tree and get dinner.” – Seth Godin
The Texas Book Festival launched by former librarian and then First Lady of Texas Laura Bush and philanthropist Mary Margaret Farabee in 1995 continues to grow in size and impact. Today the literary event brings more than three hundred authors to Austin each fall for a weekend of thought-provoking book discussions. What’s more, its book sale proceeds and attendee donations support powerful student programs in schools throughout Texas year-round.
One of those programs is Reading Rock Stars, which sends noted authors into Title I schools to inspire kids with great books and powerful live presentations. To date, the program has facilitated more than 400 author visits to Title I elementary schools in Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, and the Rio Grande Valley, and distributed more than 100,000 autographed books to students at those schools.
The newer Real Reads program serves middle and high school students in similar fashion, pairing close readings of urgent books with deep conversations with their authors. Participating authors include Kwame Alexander, Matt Mendez, Jason Reynolds, Erika Sánchez, Nic Stone, Angie Thomas, Jacqueline Woodson.
I recently spoke with Lea Bogner Loy, who, as the outreach manager for the festival from 2017 to 2019 expanded Reading Rock Stars and launched Real Reads. We discussed what separates these programs from other author visits, why kids need to see themselves in books and authors, and what she hopes her Texas Book Festival legacy will be.
What was the most meaningful part of your Reading Rock Stars experience for you?
I think the focus I brought to the program on working with authors of color. I just saw what a difference it made when the students saw an author that looked like them up there. How much they really connected with the book. I also saw how grateful librarians were because they always felt like they struggled so much to find books that related to their kids. And so for me, being able to give a platform to those authors, and also give kids that experience, was really meaningful.
What are some of your favorite Reading Rock Stars memories?
Oh man, so many. There was one in the Rio Grande Valley with Ying Chang Compestine, presenting [her book The Chinese Emperor’s New Clothes] to PreK, K, and 1 students. She was talking about how she was an immigrant and all the kids were saying how they were immigrants too. There was that moment of cross-cultural understanding that was really special.
And there were always moments where kids would say, “I get to keep this book?” or “I’ve never had a book before.” That happened at every school we went to and every time it was always a gut punch. It was a reminder that we were doing important work.
During your tenure, you also launched the Real Reads program for middle and high school students. Why was it important to you to provide author programming for older students?
I think there’s a magic of reading that starts to get lost as you get older, especially for the students who aren’t seeing themselves in books. It’s an issue across the board. I remember being in school thinking “I can’t read The Grapes of Wrath or Shakespeare anymore. I want to read something that’s relevant and interesting to me.”
When you don’t have any reason to get connected to a book, you’re just not going to read as much. And it’s so important to continue to read—not only for vocabulary acquisition or to do well on standardized tests, but to be connected to modern issues.
And so that’s what Real Reads did. It gave students books that were really interesting to them and relevant, but that were also connected to things that they were seeing in the news and dealing with on a personal level. So they were able to really bring it all together and ignite that spark for reading.
I think people, especially literacy programs, have started to write off older students and think that they’re kind of a lost cause by the time they get to high school. And I really disagree with that.
What do you hope your Reading Rock Stars legacy will be?
Legacy is a big question. There are two parts of it. One is you’re just getting kids excited about reading, which so many authors are great about. But I think in publishing and in charity it’s easy to fall into the white savior complex of “I’m going to do these nice things for these kids of color and it’s going to change their lives.” If we’re not more intentional about it, it’s not going to make the kind of impact that it should.
I hope my legacy is that this program is not only about showing kids that reading is fun and important, but that they deserve books and that they’re empowered to do whatever it is they want to in their lives.
When I was in the classroom, the curriculum that was given to me was all about young white boys and 100% of my students were black. It was heartbreaking. Kids deserve to see themselves in books and if I had the platform to be able to bring a book to a child, I wanted to make sure that either it was going to be really funny and make them really love reading or they were going to see themselves in the book and feel empowered and seen.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Learn More About Reading Rock Stars and Real Reads
Pronouns just aren’t what they used to be. Apparently, new uses of the word they sent people to the dictionary in droves in 2019. Online searches for the word spiked 313% from the year before. And the upsurge in curiosity about the 600-year-old word lead dictionary giant Merriam-Webster to name they the word of the year.
We’ve long thought of they as referring to groups of people, animals, or things. Or even (though more recently) to singular people if their identities aren’t known or specified. For example, “the person who answered the phone said they didn’t know when the homeowner would be available.”
New to the scene is using they to refer to an individual person whose gender identity is nonbinary or unknown. The usage bubbled up from personal prerogative to the media to professional organizations. “The American Psychological Association now recommends that singular they be preferred in professional writing over he or she when the reference is to a person whose gender is unknown or to a person who prefers they,” dictionary editor Peter Sokolowski said. “It’s also increasingly common to see they as a person’s preferred pronoun in Twitter bios, email signatures, and conference name tags.
Merriam-Webster added this nonbinary sense of the word to its dictionary in September. And chose an excerpt from a New York Times article to illustrate the usage. “They had adopted their gender-neutral name a few years ago, when they began to consciously identify as nonbinary—that is, neither male nor female,” journalist Amy Harmon wrote. “They were in their late 20s, working as an event planner, applying to graduate school.”
So why should we care? Because words matter. The language we use to express ourselves and learn from others demands attention in thought and use. In this case, the care with which we use the word they speaks volumes about our willingness to accept people on the terms they’ve chosen. When we call people by the pronouns they prefer, we use language in the service of human connection.
Perhaps pronouns aren’t what they used to be because we are more complex than we once acknowledged. Maybe our language is evolving to reflect greater understanding—and acceptance.
Have you noticed an uptick in new uses of the word they? Did you look it up in the dictionary to check for new insights or understanding? Can you think of other words that are changing in meaning or use?
Sources and Further Reading
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/they
