Here & There: August 26, 2010

Back to School

From Reading Rockets: Bright Ideas for Back-to-School Night … and Beyond (2010)

From Scholastic: Back-to-School Planning Guide

From Modern Family: Back to School Books

From The PlanetEsme Plan: MESSING AROUND ON THE MONKEY BARS (POETRY) and NEW BACK-TO-SCHOOL BOOKS (September 2009)



Other Issues

From NCTE
NCTE Executive Committee Cancels 2012 Phoenix Convention
The 2012 NCTE Annual Convention will be held in Las Vegas, Nevada, November 14-19

On August 9, 2010, NCTE cancelled its Annual Convention that had been scheduled to be held November 14-19, 2012, in Phoenix, Arizona. The NCTE Executive Committee determined that Arizona law S.B. 1070 made it inadvisable to hold the meeting. Through the law, conditions have been created which would undercut NCTE’s core value commitment to diversity and
present a risk for many members who might be detained for an immigration check should they be stopped by police, with or without a warrant, during their stay in the city.


From Publishers Weekly
By John A. Sellers (8/18/2010)
Authors Withdraw from Teen Lit Festival

Excerpt:
Blogs, Twitter, and Facebook have been abuzz in the last 24 hours with news that four YA authors have pulled out of the annual Teen Lit Fest in Humble, Tex., a Houston suburb. The authors withdrew in support of writer Ellen Hopkins, who announced in a blog post last week that she had been disinvited from the festival, which is organized by the Humble Independent School District, and is scheduled for January 2011. In the post, entitled “Censorship Bites,” Hopkins announced that her invitation had been revoked after a middle-school librarian and parents approached a superintendent and the school board about her participation. Hopkins’s novels in verse deal with gritty subject matter: her Crank series, which concludes next month with Fallout, centers on meth addiction, while her 2009 novel, Tricks, was about teen prostitution. “We all feel badly that we’re making this stand,” Hopkins told School Library Journal. “We don’t want our readers to feel like we’re punishing them. But this is about having the right to read our books, and these people don’t have the right to say you can’t.”