Ride a Fast Horse: WordPress Q&A
Thanks to all the clever creators at the Wild, Wild Midwest SCBWI Conference for attending my “Speak Your Mind, But Ride a Fast Horse: Rework Your Online Presence with WordPress” workshop. We did the workshop Q&A as a write-in and I hope these answers might help you in your ride Westwards into web development. (Feel feel to ride over to our partner Q&A about Marketing, All Hat, No Cattle, here.) NEW TO THE WEB? If I am just getting started, where should I start? You need three things (maybe four). 1) You need a domain...
read moreGot Uke
Got Uke? No? No worries, your library does. Portland, Maine library card holders can now check out ukuleles and equally hip young adult books from the Teen Room of the Portland Public Library. Based on a madcap idea by Portland Public Library teen staff member, Michael Whittaker, local businesses Curious City and Moose County Music and Surf teamed up to create a Ukulele Lending Library. Four ukuleles were donated by Moose County and named by Curious City after teen books in the Portland Public Library collection. LEARN more about Curious...
read moreDonate a Coretta Scott King Honor Book
Curious City likes to see fine books doing their good work in the world. In celebration of the honor bestowed upon Daniel Minter by the Coretta Scott King Award Committee of the American Libraries Association for the illustrations in Ellen’s Broom, Curious City and Daniel Minter’s colleagues and friends are donating copies of the book to the The National Museum of African American History and Culture’s education department at the Smithsonian. Marcia and Daniel Minter ELLEN’S BROOM Lino Cut ELLEN’S...
read morePress Gang Audio
The astounding educators of the Breakwater School are leading their students to piracy! With Scott Nash’s chapter book, The High-Skies Adventures of Blue Jay the Pirate (Candlewick Press) as their piratical press gang, students will be performing a “flash mob” performance of a chapter from the swashbuckling tale. To give the performance the framework and mast of Nash’s written word, Curious City partnered with audiobook producer William Dufris of Mind’s Eye Productions to record Breakwater students...
read moreAuthor Has Mercy (And TV Appearance)
Children’s author Sarah L. Thomson was invited by the producers of the Travel Channel’s program Monumental Mysteries to recount the strange life (and death) of Mercy Brown, the inspiration for Sarah’s young adult novel, Mercy: The Last New England Vampire (Islandport Press). After all of the research Sarah did on the 19th Century tuberculosis outbreak that led bizarrely to accusations of vampirism, Curious City built a website for the book and encouraged Sarah to blog about her research and other connections to...
read moreMLK ‘s Young Citizens
Children attending the 32nd Annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Breakfast Celebration in Portland, Maine will be treated to a series of art activities and games about cooperation, citizenship, and American history. Children ages 4-7 will meet Maine children’s book author/illustrator Cathryn Falwell and hear a reading of her award winning picture book, David’s Drawings (Lee & Low Books) In the story, a boy walks to school in the winter and is struck by the beauty of a leafless tree. He makes a drawing of the tree in class,...
read moreMoonbird and Bunny Ears
Curious City accompanied Phillip Hoose to Harpswell Community TV to record his acknowledgement speech for the YALSA Excellence in NonFiction Award for his book Moonbird: A Year on the Wing with the Great Survivor B95. Passing sunlit coves and stands of pine, we kept an eye out for the tower that would mark America’s last non-digital community station. A map inside the door was marked with red dots showing their transmission range down the pennisulas and up the rolling hills of Downeast Maine. Don, Donna, and...
read moreAll But the Kitchen SYNC
Curious City is selecting the new titles for the fourth summer of FREE audiobook downloads from SYNC YA Literature Into Your Earphones. So many tremendous listens to choose from! We are also awash in colorful design work from Marty Braun Design as we get materials ready for our publisher partners at ALA Midwinter. Share...
read moreIntern on Self-Taught Artist Bill Traylor
CURIOUS CITY, a children’s book consulting company that builds creative marketing projects and outreach for authors, illustrators, and publishers focused on engaging readers with story, is looking for an intern(s) for Winter/Spring 2013. That intern can be a college student from anywhere in the U.S. THE INTERNSHIP would be focused on the picture book It Jes’ Happened: When Bill Traylor Started to Draw by Don Tate and illustrated by R. Gregory Christie. “…the story of this man’s life is an introduction to a...
read moreSweet Intern Experience
Once again, Maine College of Art (MECA) proves to be a sweet dance partner. This semester Jessica Tomlinson, MECA’s Director of Artists at Work and I dug through my shelf of upcoming children’s book marketing projects and found one for a MECA Illustration student to jitterbug to. Author Jen Bryant and illustrator Melissa Sweet will soon release A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin, a picture book biography of a self-trained artist that overcame war and disability to recapture the joy he had as a boy...
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