GREAT NEWS

Audible has purchased the rights to do audio books of the YA speculative fiction novels A Girl Called Fearless and its sequel A Girl Undone by Catherine Linka.

Alexis O’Neill’s newest picture book, The Kite That Bridged Two Nations, received a Eureka! Honor Award for Children’s Nonfiction Books at the fall conference of the California Reading Association.

Shane Prigmore and Sue Ganz-Schmitt have been chosen by Chronicle Books Marketing and Publicity team (by popular vote!) to be one of two recipients of their Author/Illustrator Appreciation Award for Spring 2014 for their work on Planet Kindergarten.

Lucy Ravitch is excited to be running a Kickstarter during the month of January to raise funds to publish The Pancake Menu, the first book in the Kids Menu Books series. Kids get to practice math while they play restaurant!

Tom Rogers is happy to report that Eleven, his middle-grade novel about a boy turning eleven on 9/11, is now an approved selection of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum and is sold at its two stores at the World Trade Center. It was a good month for Eleven, which also won a silver medal in its category in the Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards and a first place in its category in the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards. Tom continues helping teachers present the book in schools across the country; a teaching guide will be available shortly. For more information, visit www.eleventhebook.com.

Gold for Mumbet! Mumbet’s Declaration of Independence by Gretchen Woelfle, illustrated by Alix Delinois (Carolrhoda) won a 2014 Eureka! Gold Award from the California Reading Association.

CLASSES

Think writing easy readers isn’t so easy?

Terry Pierce will teach a 10-week online course, “Introduction to Writing Easy Readers,” for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, January 7 – March 11. The course explores various types of beginning readers, including easy-to-reads, friendship series, nonfiction, poetry collections, and leveled readers. Students will learn about the specific needs of children who are learning to read. Instructor feedback and group workshopping helps students to develop a completed easy reader manuscript. For more information, please visit: www.uclaextension.edu/Pages/fos/Writing.aspx.

Art Center College of Design Night Program –

626-396-2319 or www.artcenter.edu/atnight

Otis College of Art and Design

310-665-6850 or 310-665-6950. Email: otisce@otis.edu

UCLA Extension Writers’ Program www.uclaextension.edu/writers

As the largest and most comprehensive university-related writing program in the nation, the UCLA Extension Writers’Program equips new and practicing writers with the tools they need to tell their stories and to seek out publication and production. UCLA offers more than 500 annual onsite and online writing courses in writing for the youth market, as well as fiction, memoir, personal essay, poetry, playwriting, publishing, feature film, and television writing. For more information: 310-825-9415. To enroll: 310-825-9971 or 818-784-7006.