CALL FOR NOMINATIONS | CCBC Board of Directors

The Canadian Children’s Book Centre is seeking passionate and dedicated individuals to serve on the Board of Directors. We have two vacancies to fill at our upcoming Annual General Meeting on June 6, 2024. Learn more here.

UPCOMING WEBINAR | Get Published! Writing Fiction or Young Readers

What does it take to get a children's/teen novel published? What are children’s book publishers looking for? Our panel of experts will explain how to get your manuscript in tip-top shape. Join us on Saturday, May 11 and let our panel of experts show you the best ways to turn your dream of writing a children's/teen novel into a reality! Full of expert advice from industry professionals, budding creators will not want to miss this session! Our panel of industry professionals includes authors Vicki Grant and Michelle Kadarusman, and Patricia Ocampo, Senior Editor, Kids Can Press. Register today!

SAVE THE DATE! | Virtual Silent Auction (April 20-28, 2024)

From April 20-28, the CCBC will be hosting a virtual silent auction! Prizes will include museum passes, tickets to performing arts events, Canadian books for young people (of course!), art, and much more. Take a chance and win some fantastic items, while supporting the CCBC at the same time. Treat yourself to something nice, you deserve it! Follow us on social for updates: @kidsbookcentre

Canadian publishers Drawn & Quarterly and Greystone Kids among the finalists for the 2024 BOP

The Bologna Prize for the Best Children’s Publishers of the Year (BOP) is awarded annually to highlight excellent publishing houses from all over the world. Canadian publishers Drawn & Quarterly and Greystone Kids are among the shortlisted publishers. Established in 2013, the BOP is an extraordinary occasion to highlight publishers at the forefront of innovation in their activity for the creative nature of the editorial choices they have made during the previous year. The announcement of the winners will be held during the Bologna Children's Book Fair, which is taking place from April 8-11, 2024. Learn more here.

Celebrate Spring with Beautiful Art

Spring is here and why not celebrate with a beautiful piece of art? Visit the Picture Book Gallery today to find one-of-a-kind art, perfect for gifts, library spaces, corporate use and more. 

In November 2021, we launched the Picture Book Gallery as a way to generate funds for Canadian Children’s Book Week, which connects Canadian creators with children and teens across Canada. The Picture Book Gallery supports our annual tour that allows 28,000 young Canadians to participate in over 400 readings and workshops in a single week. Illustrators set their own prices, with 60% of the value of their art sold donated to Book Week. This event is a great opportunity for illustrators to showcase their work to a wider audience, all while generously contributing to a love of reading in children across Canada.

Recently, the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA) announced the winner and honourable mentions for the 2023 Freeman Book Awards. The awards recognize quality books for children and young adults that contribute meaningfully to an understanding of East and Southeast Asia. One Canadian title—The Cricket War—took home the win in the Young Adult/Middle School Literature category. Two other Canadian titles were named honourable mentions. Learn more here.

The Writers' Federation of New Brunswick (WFNB) has announced the shortlisted titles for the 9th annual New Brunswick Book Awards. The winners will be revealed at an awards ceremony on Saturday, June 1, as part of WFNB’s annual WordSpring writing festival in Moncton. The program will celebrate books published in the 2023 calendar year in the categories of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and children’s picture books. Learn more here.

The shortlist for the 2023 IODE Jean Throop Award has been announced. Established in 1974 by IODE Toronto Education Officer Jean Throop to encourage excellence in Canadian children’s literature, the annual prize is awarded to an author and/or illustrator who resides in Ontario. Sixty-two titles were submitted to the committee for consideration. The winner will be announced at the IODE Ontario's annual meeting in Goderich, Ontario on April 20, 2024. Learn more here.

Are Audiobooks Real Books?
 

Nicole Wallace, a teacher-librarian in Victoria, BC, decided to take action to help middle-grade students who were struggling with reading. Looking for a new way to hook so-called reluctant readers, she decided to see if audiobooks might make a difference.

With funding from her school district, Nicole began an inquiry project to introduce audiobooks in classrooms and track responses from teachers and students. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Among key findings: non-readers were quicker to start reading, read longer, and actually finished books—some for the first time. Equally importantly, what began as a project about reading engagement grew into addressing issues of accessibility, equity, and inclusion. As Nicole says:

“If we’re trying to have students enjoy reading and they’re not capable of accessing print text, why are we not giving them what they need to be on the same level as their peers? That’s what equity is all about.”

Head to our Bibliovideo YouTube channel to learn more about Nicole’s experience in the video, Yes, Audiobooks ARE Real Books! Leave us a comment to let us know what you think about using audiobooks in the classroom.

You can read details of the project in the Canadian School Libraries Journal.

Look for great Canadian audiobooks for kids and teens in our Accessible Books Bank.

Publishers: Enjoy the replay of our Accessibility Metadata for Children's Publishers webinar.

April Book List: National Poetry Month

In honour of National Poetry Month, our book list features Canadian poetry—from picture books to poetry collections and novels in verse. Get young readers excited about reading with this curated list, great for families, librarians and teachers.

You are a writer, calligrapher, and theatre artist, three creative pursuits which are built on the foundation of words. What attracts you to words? How do words inspire, motivate, challenge and/or change you as a writer?

I come from a word-obsessed family. My grandmother was a writer, editor, and bookstore owner. My mother was a book designer. My uncle was a journalist. I married a writer. Perhaps it is not a big surprise that words are the foundational tool in my life!

My mother enrolled me in a calligraphy course when I was a teenager. I went on to do extensive studies of the development of letterforms. For me, calligraphy was a gateway into cultural history and the whole concept of written language. It was also fundamental in giving me a tactile relationship to words. When you calligraph, you work very slowly. You focus on creating shapes and manipulating space on the page. On a good day, it is very meditative. You involve your breath and connect to the movement of your hand on the page. You go down into the bones of a word, and how one letter connects to another. It’s an intimate relationship between gesture and meaning. 

This may be why I write first drafts by hand. I love feeling the graphic line and how it dances across a piece of paper. It stimulates a particular part of my brain and opens me up to things that are not available to me through typing on a keyboard. My manuscripts would be illegible to anyone else––they are filled with the movement of my hand and brain, working together.

However, the challenge for me is not to overwork words in the editing process. How do I keep the sense of freedom and lightness of the word dance on a page, when I want to work on word choice? How do you make something look effortless when it takes a huge amount of effort and skill? But that, I think, is the plight of anyone working in the arts. You must make it feel fresh and new, yet it must be crafted to the best of your ability. That’s where practice and rehearsal become essential. It’s not something you can achieve in a first draft.

The theatre world is a place you know well. You served as executive director of Ottawa School of Speech & Drama as well as founded the Ottawa Children’s Theatre and served as its artistic director. Your writing and theatre worlds united when you and your husband co-wrote Rosie Backstage. How else has your work as a theatre artist influenced or informed your writing for young people?

Perhaps even more fundamentally, however, is how my vocal training has affected the way I work with words and my word choices. Writing is a stand-in for spoken words, so I need to always go back to the vocal source. Learning about breath, resonance, and articulation has given me a very deep physical relationship to words. There is some brain science that suggests that as we read, our mind and body recreate the physical sensation of making the words we are reading. I want people to not only hear the words on the page, but to feel them and recognize them in their own body. 

On a practical level, I have taught theatre to young people for many, many years and continue to work in that field. Working with youth keeps me honest. They engage me in their concerns and in what matters to them. It is far too easy to get ghettoized in your own age group. Working inter-generationally is vital to me.

In These Are Not the Words, Missy and her father write poems for each other—poems that gradually become an exchange of apologies as her father’s alcohol and drug addiction begins to overtake their lives. How can we use poetry to communicate with others and to heal ourselves?

I also think that poetry, like theatre or calligraphy, is a kind of game. It’s got some great rules that give us a context for deep exploration. You play with sound and rhythm, and in that playing, you can trick your mind into finding new meanings. 

Writing is about asking questions—of yourself, of your imagined reader. Questions can form the base for a dialogue. It’s the best way to talk to yourself. And when you talk to yourself, you can heal.

Science and poetry may seem like strange bedfellows but they share commonalities such as formulas and patterns. What was your inspiration to write A Planet is A Poem, a collection of poems about the solar system?

At the same time, I was introduced to the American poet Joyce Sidman. Sidman writes non-fiction poetry books for young people. I love her work and it opened up a whole world for me. My first books had been non-fiction books for young people and truth be told, I am much more comfortable writing non-fiction than I am writing fiction. I became open to the idea that poetry could be a vehicle for young people to learn about nature. I thought that maybe I could write non-fiction poetry and it wouldn’t be as embarrassing as bad personal poetry. 

The other influence was the CBC radio program Quirks and Quarks. I love that show and in one particular episode (September 11, 2015), they talked about the New Horizons space probe. It had just started sending images of Pluto back to Earth and everyone was talking about these amazing things we were learning. On Pluto, the skies are blue! There are volcanos of slow-moving nitrogen mud! There’s a red, heart-shaped plateau that moves like a heartbeat! Who wouldn’t want to write a poem about that? I wrote "A Pantoum for Pluto" so that I could explore Pluto but also try that poetic form. Ultimately, we didn’t use that particular poem in the book, but the process was set in motion. Before I knew it, I was deep into researching (always my happy place), and the puzzle of writing non-fiction poetry.

A Planet is a Poem offers readers multiple access points for interaction. There are 14 poems which can be enjoyed on their own. Plus, there is accompanying factual information about each poem’s subject matter. And, last but not least, there is information on the forms in which the poems are written. How did you decide to present the book in this format? And why was it important to you to create the book this way?

I had quite a few coffee dates with Katie Scott at Kids Can Press, where I tried to pitch her on the idea of non-fiction poetry about planets and/or insects (another area I was obsessing about because of Quirks and Quarks). But they already had a book coming out the next year on space, and one on bugs. The question was what might make mine unique.

I don’t know exactly how the idea of a cross-curricular book came about. I was pretty passionate about poetic forms, and somehow the brainstorming led us to a book that could give the science and the poetry equal weight. Both Katie and my editor Kathleen Keenan got excited about doing a book that could show kids both the magic of language and of the solar system. 

Once we had the basic idea, I researched the solar system. I’m not a scientist, but I love astronomy and still remember being in the Hayden Planetarium in New York when I was a child. I researched each planet as though it was a character in a novel. I worked on matching those characteristics with a particular poetic form. For example, Mercury, which is the smallest planet, is incredibly fast. It travels around the sun more quickly than any of the others. So, I paired it with a very fast rhyming and rhythm scheme inspired by Dr. Suess, with only two beats to the bar. 

Mercury’s tiny ––

Of planets, the smallest.

But named for a god

Who was known as the fastest.

I researched because I loved it. But as with my experiences in writing historical fiction, it became impossible to squash all of the exciting things I was learning into each poem. So, we came up with the idea of sidebars to give more of the scientific information.

The more I worked on the book, the more I got excited about the poetic forms I was using. We came up with the idea of sidebars for the poetry too, just as there were sidebars for the science. It was designer Marie Bartholomew who had the tough job of pulling all of that together with the great illustrations by Oliver Averill.

What advice would you impart to young people and the young at heart who would like to pursue careers as writers?

Read. Read everything. Listen to words, make them your friends and play with them. Sing them! Foster your sense of curiosity. Let your curiosity take you to new places. Always, always challenge yourself to try new things. Care passionately and let your writing follow your passion. Make it matter.

His picture books include Gargantua (Jr.): Defender of Earth, Super-Duper Monster, GREAT and Splinters. He also writes and illustrates non-fiction books. There are sports books (Gold Medal for Weird, Basketballogy, Baseballogy) and books on financial literacy (Follow Your Stuff and Follow Your Money). Kevin will also be touring virtually in Newfoundland during Canadian Children's Book Week, which runs from April 28 to May 4, 2024.

How did you embark on a career as an illustrator? What has your journey as an illustrator been like thus far?

I have drawn since I was a little kid. It’s both meditative and fun. But my career, such as it is, only happened when I started kicking my own butt a bit to get more consistent. Once I had a portfolio of finished pieces, I was able to approach art directors. This didn’t immediately lead to work, but got me great feedback about what worked, and more importantly, what didn’t in my work.

Then I took courses at OCAD in Toronto to work on the things I couldn’t learn just by drawing—composition, colour... knowing how a book is produced.

You create illustrations using an array of mediums: digital, pen and ink, and watercolour. Describe the process of producing artwork using each of these methods. What are the perks and challenges (if any) of working with each of these mediums?

I love drawing on paper. The feel and the challenges of incorporating mistakes into the finished piece (whiteout sometimes works, and other times it’s more fun to see what a “mistake” leads you to draw next.) So I still usually pull out a sketchbook and pen/pencil when I’m first developing an idea. But I also love to work on a number of projects at the same time so my iPad has become invaluable. It’s my portable studio… and the place where I do most of my work now. But I still tend to treat it as an analog technology… mimicking pencil and pen strokes with the brushes in Procreate. It also helps me make rapid edits and fixes. 

Throughout your illustration career, there has been much technological advancement regarding illustration tools and techniques. How have developments in illustration technology simplified, enhanced, and/or expanded how you work as an artist? Which art tools and/or equipment are must-have items for you?

See previous response. But I would add that my iPad has become indispensable. BUT I play around with settings brushes so that you can’t really tell (I hope) that I’m doing digital work. That’s my personal preference. 

Sports is one of your great passions. You served as a sportscaster on CBC Radio from 1999 to 2006 and anchored the radio coverage for four Olympic Games. Your bibliography counts numerous sports-themed titles including Shadrin Scored for Russia, Great, and Great Too. What type of research did you undertake when illustrating these three titles, which are about or inspired by real-life individuals?

One of my most hated myths (that artists hear all the time) is that references are “copying.” That a true artist simply creates from observation or imagination. I say, if you’re drawing a hockey player and are having trouble getting the pose just right… TRACE a photo. Find references online. Take photos of yourself in a mirror and copy those.

I’ve illustrated two books based on Wayne and Walter Gretzky (Great and Great Too), and I used photos of them both to create the character designs. I then sketched a lot of kids playing hockey to get the proportions right. Then I traced some photos to get the hands and fore-shadowing right on slap shots and saves. I did the same thing for Splinters way back when.

I remember the first time I saw just how many reference photos Norman Rockwell would use to make a painting seem realistic. He’d “copy” the faces, gestures, folds of clothing… and make something that was more alive and deep than the original. That’s the transformation. It’s not cheating. It’s a kind of magic. You know what’s not magical? Boring pictures with oddly shaped bodies, faces and so on. 

So… watch sports if you want to draw sports. Watch dancers if you want to draw dancers. And so on.

What advice would you offer to young people and adults who wish to pursue a career as a children’s book illustrator?

Draw all the time. And FINISH a few pieces you like. I have always drawn and love doodling. 

But there wasn’t (I don’t think) a natural talent there. I just kept working at it… and I wasn’t afraid to copy other styles to learn how other illustrators solved problems. (You could spend a lifetime examining the layout, colour scheme, character design and line work in Where the Wild Things Are).

When I started focusing my pictures to match text (trying to get my portfolio out there to art directors) I realized I needed to work on developing characters and styles to be more consistent. So I started taking more care in how I started my drawings, and developed character sheets for books that only existed in my head.

One of the best ways to challenge your thinking is to watch other artists draw. Check out any number of Instagram feeds.

View Kevin Sylvester's art in the Picture Book Gallery.

The 2023 First Nation Communities READ-nominated book Drum From the Heart (2022), written by Ren Louie, Nuu-chah-nulth author and member of the Ahousaht First Nation in British Columbia, captures the excitement of a young boy who receives the gift of a handmade drum, and explains the traditional significance.  In Teachings of the Drum, an adaptation for younger readers, the joyful essence is deftly distilled into rhythmic verse: “Wrapping it in your arms to warm it is correct,/and placing it face up shows your drum respect.”  The importance of family and culture is lovingly conveyed in this lyrical, read-aloud picture book that sings from the heart. 

— Linda Ludke, Collections Management Librarian, London Public Library 

When Elodie's kindhearted master, Senhor Benet, is forced to flee from the Crusaders, Elodie and her little brother Bertram set out to find him to return the bag of gold that he left behind. They soon become lost but stumble upon Joie, a young troubadour who has recently left court life and is on a mysterious mission. The threesome join forces and they, along with Bertram's feisty pet chicken, combine their skills to create a musical storytelling group that performs for various audiences to earn the money they need to survive. This delightful historical adventure is wonderfully-crafted! The briskly-paced plot provides an insightful glimpse into the political and social machinations of the time and place (13th century in the south of France). The setting is vividly depicted and the characters are highly sympathetic and well-developed. It is a thoughtful, tender and engaging tale that explores themes of religion, family, friendship and community in a way that is nuanced and compelling.

—Lisa Doucet, Co-Manager, Woozles Children’s Bookstore