"Wake up, they're ain't no freakin' wizard." --Winston Salem Ad
"You've got to be bloody-minded and stay bloody-minded. It's a paradox: you have to have a lot of self-belief but at the same time you can't expect life to kiss you on the nose every morning. It's really pretty brutal.” –Robyn Hitchcock on being a professional creator in today's culture
""If we expose our kids to books and art, nothing but good can come from it." –Author / Illustrator Kevin Henkes
"Not every book is right for every person, but for every person exists the perfect book." –Teresa Schauer, Librarian and Diva of Book Trailers for All
"Everything is sweetened by risk." –Alexander Smith
“Why do I devote each summer to facilitating the experience of listening to young adult audiobooks through the SYNC program?
Because audiobooks nearly ruined my summer wedding.
True, my evangelism for Listening Library’s production of Philip Pullman’s THE GOLDEN COMPASS was renowned, but the bride should not have to tromp outside to locate her mother alone and wide-eyed in a parked car. A worried rap on the window (was she in deep contemplation over my sudden marriage?) was answered by the window being rolled down just a crack. Through the space, my mother said only, “Iorek is fighting,” before rolling the window up again. Fair enough…” Read More.
Posted on 04/24/2012 by Kirsten Cappy, Curious City
Why not listen to lit?
Curious City is proud to have partnered with AudioFile Magazine to create and manage SYNC, an audience building literacy project for Young Adult and Classic/Required Reading audiobooks.
We have not only built a list of 20 FREE audiobooks that will be available in the Summer of 2012, but have created a complete promotional tool kit to allow librarians, educators, literacy folks, and bloggers to spread the good news to teens and other listeners.
SYNC YA Literature into Your Earphones
2 Free Audiobook Downloads Each Week
June 14 – August 22, 2012
Teens and other readers of Young Adult Literature will have the opportunity to listen to bestselling titles and Required Reading Classics this summer. Each week from June 14 – August 22, 2012, SYNC will offer two free audiobook downloads.
The audiobook pairings will include a popular YA title and a classic that connects with the YA title’s theme and is likely to show up on a student’s summer reading lists. For example, Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone, the first book in a new series about a girl who opens a door to two otherworldly cities at war, will be paired with Charles Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities.
To find out when you can download titles to listen to on the run this summer, visit www.AudiobookSync.com or text syncya to 25827.
Posted on 04/13/2012 by Kirsten Cappy, Curious City
This weekend, Cambodians Americans in Maine and Cambodians around the world, celebrate the New Year. In celebration of that holiday, third and forth graders from Canal School in Westbrook, Maine joined Peaks Island, Maine author/illustrator Anne Sibley O’Brien to listen to a reading from O’Brien’s book about Cambodians Americans, A Path of Stars. Together they created greeting cards with “Happy New Year” written in Khmer, the language of Cambodia, and hand-drawn lotus blossoms for the Buddhist temple in Buxton, Maine.
Canal School librarian, Susan Brown invited Anne Sibley O’Brien to present her just-released book, A Path of Stars (Charlesbridge Publishing), a book commissioned by the Maine Humanities Council and created with the assistance of Maine Cambodian American residents Veasna Kem, Peng Kem and Pirun Sen.
The students listened raptly to the story of young Dara and her grandmother, Lok Yeay. Lok Yeay shares memories with Dara stories of her happy life growing up in Cambodia when her family told each other stories under the stars that “glowed like fireflies.” Sometimes, though, Lok Yeay is lost to sadness and Dara hears how Lok Yeay lost everyone but her brother in the war and how she fled to Thailand with Dara’s mother on her back.
The book touches lightly on the war in Cambodia only referring to it as “when the soldiers came,” but when Anne Sibley O’Brien finished her reading hands shot up and a boy wanted to know what the war in Cambodia was about.
“Like all wars,” Anne Sibley O’Brien replied, “the story is quite complicated.” As simply and as gently as she could, O’Brien spoke of the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Students gasped when O’Brien told them that 2 million Cambodians were lost before the conflict subsided. “You can see,” said O’Brien, “how even 35 years later, Lok Yeay could still be sad despite her wonderful life with her family in America.”
Talk turned to the celebration of the New Year and Canal School students agreed that they would like to compose New Year’s cards for Cambodian Americans celebrating at the temple in nearby Buxton, Maine. O’Brien led the students in a drawing lesson of the lotus flower, an important symbol in Cambodian culture and a frequent image in the New Year celebrations.
Students murmured as O’Brien showed them images of delicate pink lotus flowers blossoming on Cambodian bodies of water, on the grounds of the famous Cambodian temple Angkor Wat, and carved into the base of statues of the Buddha.
The students set to work drawing lotus blossoms on the front of greeting cards and tracing over the words “Happy New Year” written in Khmer on the top of their card. Third and fourth grade teachers, Mrs. Mains and Mrs. Pecoraro, encouraged their students to write their own message to their Cambodian neighbors inside the card.
One student wrote, “Cambodia is cool!” while others expressed their hope that their neighbors have a “fun day.” One student wrote, “Happy New Year Cambodia people and Uncle Whate.” It was librarian Susan Brown who translated with delight that “Uncle Whate” referred to the temple, Angkor Wat. Two students unbidden, drew Angkor Wat on their card and another stayed long after his fellow students had left so they he could handwrite “Happy New Year” in Khmer inside the card. He did this while talking about his favorite NBA teams and the basketball season.
“Having a such a diverse population as we do here at Canal, it is wonderful when we can come together and learn more about each others culture and background” said librarian Susan Brown of Canal School, “Students were very excited to think that someone they hadn’t met before would be able to see and read their New Year wishes!”
The greeting cards were created by Kirsten Cappy of the Portland business, Curious City: Where Kids & Books Meet, as a tool for schools and librarians to reach out to the community that the book featured.
“This summer a group of children’s book authors and I will begin an initiative called, ‘I’m Your Neighbor’, “said Kirsten Cappy of Curious City, “the project will create engagement tools like this to encourage the use of children’s books to build bridges between long-term communities and new arrivals. These New Year’s cards are just one way for the larger community to acknowledge an important time for their Cambodian neighbors.”
Anne Sibley O’Brien left Canal School to deliver the bundle of beautiful New Year’s greetings to her friend and collaborator on the book, Peng Kem. Mr. Kem planned to deliver the cards to his temple over the weekend. Then children’s book creator, Anne Sibley O’Brien hopped in her car to drive to Framingham, Massachusetts where 100 4th and 5th graders would create greetings of their own for their Cambodian neighbors the following day.
Posted on 04/13/2012 by Kirsten Cappy, Curious City
Phillip Hoose receiving the Katahdin Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Maine Library Association at Reading Roundup.
With the announcement today of the Katahdin Award by the Maine Library Association, Phillip Hoose becomes one of the most honored writers in Maine’s history. In its announcement of The Katahdin Award, designed to honor an author’s body of work of outstanding merit, the Maine Library Association acknowledged that Phillip Hoose’s books for children, young adults, and adults have “brought the under noticed and overlooked to stunning clarity and inclusion with the power of his storytelling.”
Hoose became known nationally when his book, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, won a National Book Award in 2010. Read by both children and adults, the book was the most honored title for young people that year, also bringing home one of the most coveted of prizes in children’s literature, the Newbery Honor. The book presented the pioneering courage of a teenage girl in the early days of the Civil Rights Movement, bringing nuance and context to accounts of the Montgomery bus boycott.
Hoose first discovered Colvin’s story while researching the 66 profiles which became the National Book Award-nominated book, We Were There Too!: Young People in U.S. History. Hoose began the six-year research and writing project after being told by a middle school student that not seeing anyone her age in her history books made her “feel invisible.” Hoose’s book restores youth to the national story. Studs Terkel called it, “maybe the most exhilarating and revelatory history of our country.”
Social activism has been at the heart of Hoose’s work. His first book for young adults, “It’s Our World, Too!” Young People Who Are Making A Difference, is a gallery of young people who created positive social change at all scales. It won the 1993 Christopher Award for “artistic excellence…affirming the highest values of the human spirit.”
Phillip Hoose with Lupine winners Melissa Sweet and Jennifer Jacobson at Reading Roundup.
Hoose’s dedication to telling the tales of the “under noticed and overlooked” began by giving voice to one of the smallest of creatures, the ant. Twenty years ago, Hoose teamed with his then 9-year-old daughter, Hannah, to compose a conversation in song between an ant and a child “with a raised-up shoe” about to casually squish it. The song, “Hey, Little Ant,” became a picture book in 1996 and since has sold more than a million copies and has been translated into 10 languages. The book’s conclusion, “What do you think that kid should do?” has spawned thousands of classroom discussions and essays and artwork by children. Teaching Tolerance Magazine called the book, “A masterpiece for classroom guidance…a terrific tool for fostering tolerance and respect for diversity in children of all ages.”
Dr. Marc Aronson of Rutgers University, also an award-winning author of non-fiction books for young people, observes that Hoose has been, “driven by his passion for nature or for history—to find truths we need to know, cloak them in vivid words and compelling pictures, and to share them with young readers.”
Hoose’s literary consideration for the perspectives of non-human species has been deeply influenced by his work with the Nature Conservancy, on whose staff he has served since 1977. In 2004, Hoose grippingly recounted the Ivory-billed Woodpecker’s slide toward extinction in his Boston Globe-Horn Book Award-winning title, The Race to Save the Lord God Bird. Said the Washington Post Book World, “There is probably more passion, sadness, villainy, heroism and sheer suspense in this account of the decline of the ivory-billed woodpecker than in any other book, of any genre, destined for young readers’ shelves this year…a magnificent book, and not just for kids.”
Seeking to draw attention to a bird that could still be saved, Hoose will release Moonbird: A Year on the Wind with the Great Survivor B95 this summer. It is the true story of a particular bionic-seeming shorebird, first banded in 1995, that has migrated from the bottom to the top of the earth and back about forty times. Identified by the inscription B95 on his left upper leg, this amazing animal racked up a total mileage exceeding that between the earth and the moon—and at a time when his subspecies is rapidly losing ground.
“I always know that a book by Phil Hoose will take a complex subject and make it understandable, while maintaining a sense of awe and wonder,” says David Allen Sibley, author of the bestselling Sibley Guide to Birds.
Katahdin Award Winner, Phillip Hoose (center) with Lupine Award Winners (left to right) Lynn Plourde, Ben Bishop, Melissa Sweet, Barbara Walsh, and Jennifer Jacobson at Reading Roundup.
Phillip Hoose’s reading audience has always extended beyond young people. Many booksellers have sold The Race to Save the Lord God Bird, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, and his biography, Perfect, Once Removed—about his connection to his baseball-hero cousin Don Larsen—to both children and adult readers. Hoose also has two successful adult titles: Necessities: Racial Barriers in American Sports, hailed by USA Today as, “The essential primer in any serious discussion about racism in sports,” and Hoosiers: The Fabulous Basketball Life of Indiana, hailed by Sports Illustrated’s Alex Wolff as, “the one book about high school basketball in Indiana that has lasted and will last, with good reason.”
“As soon as a new Phil Hoose book is published, my house erupts in a nerdy clandestine battle of who-will-read-it-first,” say Chris Bowe, owner of Longfellow Books in Portland, Maine, “At my bookstore, I know a new Hoose book will mean well fed booksellers and well read customers.”
From the smallest of creatures, ants and shorebirds, to the under noticed yet crucial acts by young people throughout history like Claudette Colvin, Phillip Hoose has brought Maine readers and readers across the globe a lifetime of stories of perseverance, justice, and courage.
(Thank you to children’s author Lynn Plourde for the photos!)
Posted on 04/11/2012 by Kirsten Cappy, Curious City
Helping readers uncover good stories
“The advent of e-readers has revolutionized how people read. In seconds, readers can have a new book in hand. What has not changed is the fact that they have to know that a book exists before they can want it. “In the end, the challenge still is, how does a reader find that story or author in the first place?” says book marketing consultant Kirsten Cappy ’92…”
Come over for a little scare or at least a little banter…
Saturday, March 31
1:00 PM
Abromson Center
USM, Portland, Maine
(Ages 9 and up)
Facing Your Inner & Outer Demons: Teen Issues in Paranormal Fiction
Young Adult authors discuss incorporating real life teen issues into their paranormal novels Mercy, Fury, and Bloodspell with moderator Kirsten Cappy of Curious City.
Posted on 03/25/2012 by Kirsten Cappy, Curious City
Curious City is proud to sponsor the Portland Children’s Film Festival and its astounding lineup of films from around the world. Don’t miss any of these beauties…
Screening of Eleanor’s Secret with post-film discussion led by Marilyn Melton and other panelists from the Portland Public Library and East End Community School.
Screening of Kick Like a Girl, a documentary film about what happens when “The Mighty Cheetahs,” an undefeated third-grade girls’ soccer team competes in the boys’ division. Post-film debriefing and activity.
Kids Party Mix: International Short Film Collection (with children, teachers and parents from EECS serving as the MCs and leading discussion groups).
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WE ARE MAINE: Nyajal’s Story (Sudan)
Saturday, 3/31/12 from 11 – 11:45 am East End Community School
Workshop/Movie
Ages K-2
Free (limit 30)
Presented by: Shana Jaques, Children’s Museum of Maine
The program begins with a short film from the Children Museum’s “We Are Maine” series, followed by a hands-on artifact exploration, discussion, and a craft activity.
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YOUNG FILMMAKERS CONTEST AWARD WINNING FILMS
Saturday, 3/31/12 from 12:45-1:30 PM Portland Public Library, Rines Auditorium
All Ages
Free
FREE SHOWING OF YOUNG FILMMAKERS CONTEST AWARD WINNING FILMS
This event is a non-ticketed, first-come, first-served event, and an opportunity for all the young filmmakers to see their films on a big screen. Come support the budding filmmakers!
Local Filmmaker Dovid Muydermon Leads Discussion and Q & A About His Film-In Progress: The Lighthouse, which touches on his experience at the Lighthouse Shelter for Teens in Portland, Maine, followed by Screening and Discussion of Local Student Films from the Young Filmmakers Competition.
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SECRET OF THE KELLS
3/31/12 from 3:30 – 5:30pm
University of Southern Maine
Masterton Hall Room 113, 71 Bedford Street
Ages 10 & up Buy Tickets
Showing of The Secret of Kells, an Irish-French-Belgian animated feature film set in the 7th century that gives a fictional account of the creation of the Book of Kells. The Secret of Kells premiered at the2009 at the Berlin International Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
Introduction and discussion by Beata Niedzialkowska, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art History, Bates College and Kathy Ashley, Distinguished Professor of English, University of Southern Maine.
Showing of Azur and Asmar, described by the Philadelphia Inquirer as: “The tale of two brothers from childhood to manhood, it is rife with storybook themes and offers an inspiring vision of harmony between different cultures, different people.” With discussion lead by Anne Sibley O’Brien.
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GIRL’S POV & WORKSHOP WITH FILMMAKER HILARY WEISMAN GRAHAM
Sunday, 4/1/12 from 9 am -12 pm
Zero Station
Ages 9 & up Buy Tickets
Showing and Discussion of Girls’ POV (a collection of international short films focusing on female protagonists and exploring common teen and tween girl issues around the world) followed by interactive workshop with Hilary Weisman Graham, a screenwriter, novelist, and director whose work spans nearly two decades. An Emmy-nominated TV producer, her broadcast credits include WMUR’s Chronicle, Wild Web (CBS/Eyemark), as well as freelance work for Discovery Health Channel, Access Hollywood, A&E Biography, and PBS’s Zoom.
Hilary’s two indie features (Life’s Too Good and I Love My Movie) have garnered numerous awards and played in art-houses and film festivals around the world. In the summer of 2007, Hilary was selected as a contestant on the Mark Burnett/Steven Spielberg-produced FOX reality series On the Lot: The Search for America’s Next Great Director. Out of a pool of 12,000 original applicants, Hilary stayed in the competition until only nine contestants remained, making her the longest-standing female director. Hilary has written screenplays for Inferno Entertainment, Robert Lawrence Productions, Marc Platt Productions, and the Disney Channel. Her debut young adult novel, Reunited (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers), is due out June 12, 2012.
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TAHAAN
Sunday, 4/1/12 from 2 – 4:30pm Portland Museum of Art
7 Congress Square
Ages 9 & up
Tickets for this event will be sold directly through PMA.
PMA Showing of Tahaan, a film about a young boy and his donkey in Kashmir, India that touches on the theme of childhood innocence amidst the backdrop and realities of war. Mariya Ilyas, a Bowdoin college student originally from Abbottabad, Pakistan, will lead a half hour post-film discussion on Tahaan. Ms. Ilyas will touch on challenges faced by young children growing up in turbulent communities, as well as share her observations about how young Pakistani children perceive and are impacted by local and international politics. Ms. Ilyas will also offer her own reflections on her recent journey back to Abbottabad as a Davis Projects for Peace Award Recipient, where she is engaged in an ongoing effort to introduce young students to journalism. For more information about Mariya and her work in Pakistan, visit Mariya’s blog.
My former English professor, dear friend, and stunning poet Patsy Cumming recently gifted me her collection of children’s books from her youth and from her daughters. Children’s book illustrators, Jamie Hogan and Mary Anne Lloyd joined me to sort through the titles and to spirit away their favorites into the night.
The committee gathers annually to rank and comment on board books and picture books. Four hours of children’s book critique with the doctors, home visiting nurses, early childhood educators, literacy specialists, parents, and others is an experience that always enlightens and surprises me.
Out of those conversations and title rankings come the annual Raising Readers book collection distributed throughout the state of Maine. How many books have been given to Maine kids by this fine organization? 1,751,933!
Delighted to have been asked to write about my audiobook evangelism for the International Reading Association’s ENGAGE Blog.
