Moonbird 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 Donelle invited us into the studio complete with...
Read MoreHades as Art Director
Nothing has pleased me more than playing the Lord of the Underworld. Curious City was once again invited by Mary Anne Lloyd to play Art Director for her class of Illustration majors at Maine College of Art. I was to assign a real world project and award a contract to an artist. Instead of real world, I went Underworld. Sirenz, a series by Natalie Zaman and Charlotte Bernnardo, features modern day NYC girls falling and and out of contracts with himself, the Greek God, Hades. Curious City previously built a blog for the series in which the characters of the book chat about...
Read MoreMECA is Haute: An Illustration Assignment for the Gods
I had the undeniable pleasure of talking book covers and the children’s book business with illustrator Mary Anne Lloyd’s small and hearty band of Maine College of Art (MECA) Illustration students today about the mighty YA series, Sirenz. Curious City played Art Director today assigning the cover design for Sirenz (Book 3) which will appear as an e-book in 2013. Students gasped over the opening disaster featured in Book 1’s trailer in one breath and analyzed the covers of Book 1 and Book 2 in the next. Seeing no connection between the design of the first two covers,...
Read MoreBalloons Over Broadway & No Strings International
It was was with loud cheers and bright tears that children’s literature enthusiasts met the news that Melissa Sweet had won The Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal for her visually stunning, playfully funny, and meticulously researched, Balloons Over Broadway: The True Story of the Puppeteer of Macy’s Parade. In honor of Melissa’s brilliant work and in memory of puppeteer Tony Sarg who she so lovingly portrays, readers around the country are making small donations to No Strings International, an incredible UK charity. No Strings teams the wonderful...
Read MoreChildren’s Lit Party for Marriage Equality
Author/illustrator Charlotte Agell, Author Maria Testa, Curious City, and Zero Station hosted an event for fellow children’s book creators, publishers, librarians, education advocates, and readers to learn more about the effort to win the freedom to marry for LGBTQ families in Maine in 2012. WHY CHILDREN’S LIT? Opponents to marriage equality continue to use the picture book King and King (a fairy tale about two princes falling in love) as an indication that children are being inappropriately and dangerously educated. Children’s books a danger to children? Is there a way...
Read MoreMERCY: The Last New England Vampire Launch Party
Mercy, the last New England vampire, was pulled forcibly from her tomb in 1892. The teen novel about this horrific true incident and the present-day girl who uncovers it, was launched at the Eastern Cemetery in Portland, Maine under the appropriate cover of thick fog and gray drizzle. Per your usual event, the author, Sarah L. Thomson read and signed her novel… …but she did so while the ghost of Mercy walked the graveyard beyond her. Some readers were able to catch Mercy on film and… …to take on the visage of the dead...
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