Browse titles by Joan W. Blos HERE

Newbery Award winner Joan W. Blos did not start out to be an author. She was born in 1928 and was almost forty years old when her first book was published. As well as authoring books, she studied physiology and child development and taught children’s literature.

Blos is probably best known for her novel A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl’s Journal, 1830-32, which in 1980 won the American Library Association’s Newbery Medal for the year’s most distinguished contribution to American children’s literature. Set in the early nineteenth century, A Gathering of Days is presented as a young girl’s chronicle of her life on a New England farm.

Blos’s novel Brothers of the Heart: A Story of the Old Northwest, 1837-1838 was praised by Tim Wynne-Jones in the Toronto Globe and Mail as “more powerful and more stirring that its award-winning predecessor.” A writer for the St. James Guide to Children’s Writers commented that Blos’s “language, with its rhythms and lilt of earlier times, is remarkably spare, not replete with full-blown descriptions, yet giving the reader a strong sense of place and characterization. Blos has accomplished the fine feat of balancing history with universal human experience, uniting the book’s past with the reader’s present.”

Blos has also written picture books for younger readers, among them Hello, Shoes! and Bedtime! As well as writing picture books, Blos also adapted a short autobiography by Margaret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight, Moon, into picture book format. Blos provided an afterword describing Brown’s life to accompany the adapted text.

Blos once told Something About the Author: “Truth is something that interests me alot. . . . When you write a story, you find that you have to deal with three kinds of truthfulness. There is the psychological truthfulness of your characters, the social truthfulness of their situation, and the literary truthfulness of the manner of telling. The story is what results.”

Titles by Joan W. Blos

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Browse titles by Jessica Francis Kane HERE

Jessica Francis Kane was born in Berkeley, CA, grew up in Ann Arbor, MI, and graduated from Yale. After graduation she worked in publishing in New York and Washington, D.C. Her stories have been read on BBC Radio 4 and have appeared in a number of publications, including Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, The Missouri Review, The Yale Review, A Public Space, and Granta. Her essays and humor pieces have been published in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and The Morning News, for which she is a contributing writer. Her first novel, THE REPORT (Graywolf Press, 2010) was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, and a Best Reads choice of the TV Book Club in the UK. Stage and screen rights have been optioned. A new collection of stories, THIS CLOSE, was just published by Graywolf in March 2013 and has been longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize. More information is available on her website.

Titles by Jessica Francis Kane