On Violence and Racism, Then and Now

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I’ve just been reminded of this video interview that I did for Zetta Elliott more than a year ago, after a panel at the New York Public Library. This is one of my favorite videos to date of me talking about the motivations behind writing The Rock and the River.

Plus, after my part, Zetta filmed Rita Williams-Garcia and Tonya Cherie Hegamin. Never hurts to share billing with fabulous ladies like them. This was a great panel! I have a feeling that one day soon it’s going to be time for us to take our show on the road….

Mondays at CHICKS ROCK!

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On Mondays I post at CHICKS ROCK!, the blog of The Women’s Mosaic. Check out my posts there, too!
The Women’s Mosaic is a New York City-based non-profit organization that provides education, inspiration, and motivation for women to rise up and rock the world! The Women’s Mosaic unites and empowers women through programs that promote intercultural understanding and personal growth. We are a community of diverse, dynamic women interested in expanding our horizons by creating positive change that can individually and collectively enrich the world.

Mondays at CHICKS ROCK!

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On Mondays I post at CHICKS ROCK!, the blog of The Women’s Mosaic. Check out my posts there, too!
The Women’s Mosaic is a New York City-based non-profit organization that provides education, inspiration, and motivation for women to rise up and rock the world! The Women’s Mosaic unites and empowers women through programs that promote intercultural understanding and personal growth. We are a community of diverse, dynamic women interested in expanding our horizons by creating positive change that can individually and collectively enrich the world.

Cynsational Me

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My guest post was featured yesterday on Cynsations, author Cynthia Leitich Smith‘s awesome all-things-kidlit blog.

I blogged about my inspirations for writing Camo Girl, my novel about friendship and fitting in in middle school.

Camo Girl deals with some hot-button issues of the day, like bullying, but mainly it is about learning to recognize real friendship and accepting yourself even when you are different from everyone around you.

Here’s a teaser from my guest post.:

What’s your inspiration?” is a question that most authors I know get asked a lot—by friends, by child readers, by fellow writers.

Like most authors (I suspect), I’ve developed semi-canned answers to this question—answers which are based on truth, but which always leave me feeling a bit squirmy. I never can get to the bottom of something as unwieldy as my inspiration in a sound bite….”

…which is why I had to write an entire article about it. Read the rest here.

New Year, New Directions

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Okay, so it isn’t the new year yet, but I can’t believe how fast the summer disappeared, and how quickly the fall seems to be getting chomped up, too. It’s already mid-October (eek!) and I’m sure I’ll be dragging out my snowboots and singing Auld Lang Syne much sooner than I can possibly imagine.

So, I just wanted to share a quick update about some changes that I’m planning and some new ideas that I’m forming about my online presence. In short: I need to step it up a notch! I started this blog when my first book was published, believing that it would be a good way to keep people informed of my activities. It is, but I’ve felt for a while now that I can’t be an effective blogger until I find a focus and direction for my posts that is larger than myself and more content-rich than simple self-promotion.

Happy news: After only three years, I finally figured out what I want to blog about! Hooray!

The new focus for my blog (as yet untitled) is going to be the author’s journey. I’ll share my reflections on the experience of transitioning from being a person who aspires to publish, to a person with a book contract in hand, to a person who is a published author, especially focusing on all the steps along the journey from being a debut novelist to being an established and successful author. Writers view publication as the epitome of success, but there’s also a profound personal and professional journey that begins when you get your first contract. Sometimes it feels like you’ve been thrust into no-man’s-land, and we don’t talk enough about how to negotiate the “after.” I hope this blog can become a gathering place for authors to share their experiences and struggles (personal and professional) as well as a place to welcome debut writers into the fold with resources, advice and support that will help them get off to a great start.

I’m updating my website design now, and it will all launch in January, so I’ll do some cross-posting at that time and try to drum up new traffic and start a broader conversation. In the meantime, for the benefit of my few but faithful followers, I’m going to be posting some initial material on these topics so that when the brand new blog (yay!) goes live, I’ll already have some things posted for people to look at.

Basically, this is a warning to my existing fans (you are few, but you are loyal!): Don’t freak out when I start posting more than once a week! I truly hope you’ll join me when I move to the new and improved keklamagoon.com, and that you’ll add your insights to the conversation there.

Image: Pixomar / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Mondays at CHICKS ROCK!

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On Mondays I post at CHICKS ROCK!, the blog of The Women’s Mosaic. Check out my posts there, too!
The Women’s Mosaic is a New York City-based non-profit organization that provides education, inspiration, and motivation for women to rise up and rock the world! The Women’s Mosaic unites and empowers women through programs that promote intercultural understanding and personal growth. We are a community of diverse, dynamic women interested in expanding our horizons by creating positive change that can individually and collectively enrich the world.

Sunny San Francisco

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Okay, so it wasn’t all that sunny in reality, but my recent visit to Northern California certainly left me with a nice sunny feeling inside.

I spent a week on the west coast, mostly in San Francisco with a few days spent up in Chico, California. Soon, I’ll post about the actual work I did, which was the central purpose for my travels (four events during the course of the week!), but in between, I managed to find some time to just be a tourist.

I did some research on the Black Panther Party while I was in the vicinity of the area where the group was founded, and it turns out the legacy is alive in a lot of different ways throughout the city. The tastiest homage I ran across was Black Panther fudge at Z Cioccolato. It’s their best seller. Yum!

I rode the cable cars everywhere they went! I didn’t really know how cable cars worked until I went to the Cable Car Museum, and boy, did I learn a lot about cables. However, the cable cars do not go down this road, the “crookedest” street. This cracked me up. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Sunset on the Golden Gate Bridge. Turns out, the middle of the bridge (there’s a pedestrian path) is as good a place as any to be inspired to scrawl an epic poem in your notebook, and stand there awkwardly, looking bizarre and gathering suspicious looks from passersby. Ah, the embarrasments we suffer to pursue creative arts.

Camo Girl on the Radio

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I was recently invited to speak on NPR’s Michael Eric Dyson show, interviewed by (you guessed it) Michael Eric Dyson, bestselling author, educator and radio personality. It’s always fun and exciting to be interviewed, but it’s even more so to be interviewed by someone whose books have been in my collection probably since before I really started writing. When I learned about this opportunity, it was pretty awesome for me to realize that not only had I heard of Mr. Dyson, but I could point out several volumes of his work on my own bookshelves!

I recorded the interview earlier this week in NPR’s Midtown studio here in New York. Mr. Dyson was speaking to me from the D.C. studio. Now, I know radio is a relatively old technology, but it’s still neat to think about having half a conversation in one room, in one city, when the other half is happening with someone hundreds of miles away, and have the capability to air that conversation nationally at the same time! (This wasn’t a live broadcast, but still….I’m easily impressed by and in awe of technology at all levels.)

My interview airs today in selected markets across the country, but unfortunately I don’t think it airs in New York! The good news is, a podcast of the show is available at the Dyson Show website.

It’s an hour long show; my interview segment begins at 23:00, and lasts just shy of nine minutes. Check it out!

A Capitol Adventure

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This weekend I traveled to Washington, D.C., and Charlottesville, Virginia, for a series of book events! First, I spoke to a cool group of middle schoolers at Politics & Prose Bookstore in D.C. And followed it up with a fun, rowdy auditorium full of sixth graders at nearby Deal Middle School. I got to share my Camo Girl slideshow for the first time–it was exciting to discuss new content in a school visit. Much as I love talking about The Rock and the River, it’s really neat to have a second book out there that kids are reading, too!

Next, I traveled with friend and fellow author Tami Lewis Brown down to Charlottesville for the Virginia Festival of the Book. It’s always great to spend time in the company of other authors, and it was an extra special treat to get to see my dear friend Ashley Bryan, an award-winning author and illustrator. I was invited to introduce him at the Sweet Reads book fair, where he received an honor for his work!

At the festival itself, I sat on a panel called Spinning Lives into Story, along with Tami Lewis Brown, Maha Addasi, moderated by librarian Louise Simone. We spoke about historical fiction, non-fiction, and multicultural fiction: all kinds of stories based on real lives and experiences that we as children’s authors have a responsibility to make as true as possible. But what is TRUTH, when it comes to fiction? How much can authors make up, and how much should we keep perfectly true to life? What damage does it do to kids’ understanding of history if authors falsify or embellish details in a biography? The discussion was lively and really drew people in. We could have talked for days!

It was particularly exciting to be able to speak briefly about my new non-fiction release, Today the World is Watching You (Lerner 2011), about the Little Rock Nine and the fight for school integration in the late 1950s, after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board decision. Here’s the cover!