Children’s Book Authors at the California Reading Association Conference

Such fun visiting with lots of authors, teachers, and librarians at this weekend’s California Reading Association Professional Development Institute! Here are some of the lovely authors I spent the day with:

With Edith Hope Fine, Judith Josephson, and Lori Mitchell, some of my SCBWI author pals.

The awesome Cindy Pon.

Of course Edith, Judith, and I insisted on a photo with Betty Birney, author of the Humphrey novels, The Seven Wonders of Sassafras Springs, and a zillion other books.

I had the fun of sitting next to Shelley Moore Thomas, who writes the delightful Good Knight early reader series. Her new middle-grade novel, The Seven Tales of Trinket, sounds extremely enticing. Nested stories, Celtic lore: yeah, she had me at hello.

Farther down the table was Amanda Noll—unfortunately I flubbed my photo of her, so you get her book cover instead. Doesn’t it just GRAB you? Looking forward to enjoying this one with my small fry.

My photo of Barrie Summy came out blurry too. I loved getting to know her and I love these book titles!

These guys were charming and I’ll be writing more about them for GeekMom: Adam Glendon Sidwell and his brother Jarom. Cool animation background, a ton of creative ideas for teaching story structure to kids, and a book called Evertaster. (Speaking of amazing covers.)

The SCBWI gang. Andrea Zimmerman (author of many books including a Huck favorite, Trashy Town), Judith, Edith, me, Erin Dealey (author of, among other books, the supercute Little Bo Peep Can’t Get to Sleep—this one has Rillabook written all over it, and the art is so cute I’m tempted to buy a second copy for print-framing), Suzanne Santillan (author of Grandma’s Pear Tree, a really lovely picture book), and Shelley.

Same group, except Andrea has left and we’ve added the great Milly Lee!

Here’s my corner of the table. 🙂 Fox and Crow missed the photo op! It sold out before I remembered to get a picture. Speaking of photo ops, I love the Betty Birney/Erin Dealey picture happening behind me.

Many thanks to the fine folks of the California Reading Association for having us, and thanks to The Yellow Book Road children’s bookstore for stocking our books!