Originally posted on the Island Books blog In July of 2018, I read about fifteen Young Adult (YA) books. I consumed them. Whether on audio, from the library, or the advanced copies from the store, I could not get enough. This was a new development. In high school I read some, mostly Cassandra Clare or …
One of the many wonderful things about winning this award is being officially reminded that I now belong to the Pacific Northwest. It has been five years since we moved to Portland, my wife’s hometown, and my extended family spent the first several years worrying that I wouldn’t be happy here. I grew up in …
Winter evenings by the wood stove present just the right opportunity for revisiting a classic book. And for anyone who studies and writes about natural history, as I do, few titles are more foundational than Walden by Henry David Thoreau. It’s the sort of text that gets quoted more than read, however, and I couldn’t recall …
Washington Black is a novel about a boy of precarious visibilities: he is all too visible to those who would demean his humanity; he is all too invisible to those who might recognize his gifts and value his very real potential to make great contributions to the world. Born an eleven-year old field slave in …
I’d been reading picture books to my kids for years before writing my own. I’d always taken pleasure in them but never really considered what a deep art form the genre is. It took creating Libba to figure that out.First, let’s take the words. Like in a song or poem, I wanted to get them just right. …
I was born in Seattle, at Swedish First Hill, but my family moved away when I was a baby. My parents had grown up in Queen Anne and Ballard, attended Seattle Pacific University, and pastored their first church in Renton. So every summer, my family made the long drive from our home in San Diego …
There’s a scene in A False Report I think of often. Stacy Galbraith, a police detective in Golden, Colorado, goes home after work. She tells her husband about a case she’s working—a rape investigation with all kinds of chilling twists. Her husband works at another police department, nearby. He listens, then tells her: We’ve got …
Musician Laura Veirs turns the spotlight on folk singer Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten for her debut picture book. Veirs traces the story of a girl who was meant to play music despite all the things going against her. Even the guitars weren’t made for a left-hander like Libba. But plucky Libba just “turned the guitar upside …
The Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, a trade association of independent booksellers, publishers, authors, and librarians, announced the winners of the 2019 Northwest Book Awards. The awards are selected by a committee of independent booksellers from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska. From more than 400 nominations written or illustrated by creators from the Pacific Northwest …
