Poetry Friday... on Poetry Friday!

I'm long overdue in posting here about the remarkable Poetry Friday Anthology - a collection of poems and curricular connections put together by Janet Wong and Sylvia Vardell. You should own a copy whether you're teacher, student, parent or poetry lover.

I don't say that just because I have two poems in the anthology. I say that because it's flat out great reading (not to mention perfect for schools). Plus, the poets who contributed are an utterly remarkable lot (and I am kinda giddy to find myself mixed in among them).

I could go on, but for an incredible glimpse of what's inside (and why), I want to send you over to an amazing post on Renee LaTulippe's blog. (Bonus fun is that it's a Poetry Monday post about Poetry Friday which I send you to on a Friday).

Speaking of which... this week's Poetry Friday roundup is over at TeacherDance today. I hope you enjoy it and the anthology, too!

Get Thee to the Cybils Now and...

Nominate, nominate, nominate!

Yes, it's that time of year again - nominations for the Cybils are open til October 15th. Follow the link to go nominate your favorite books of the year. All the possible categories are in the sidebar (right now you have to scroll down a bit to see 'em) and they range from book apps to poetry to graphic novels to YA.

Go on, now. Join the fun!

Awesomeness in Song (and Book!)

This is a video of author (and ukelele player, obviously!) Mike Jung at the official book launch for his debut novel Geeks, Girls, and Secret Identities.

You won't see me do this at my launch... but that's only cuz I can neither sing or play like he can. If I could, I'd ask him for the rights to this song in a heartbeat.

Go buy his book. I mean, if you like seriously funny middle grade stuff and all. Or if you just want to help him get new pants.

(And if you can't see the video here, check it out on YouTube cuz it'll make you smile.)

A Poem for Banned Books Week

A Poem for Banned Books Week

by

Greg Pincus

Lay off my Harry Potter.

Please leave Tango here with me.

Let me read Alexie's Diary from sea to shining sea.

When Margaret wants to talk to God

Don't take away her voice.

Avoid To Kill a Mockingbird but let ME make MY choice.

I'm enlisting in the Chocolate War.

I'll count Alice as my friend.

What My Mother Doesn't Know can't hurt me in the end.

Twilight and the Hunger Games?

Don't rip them from my hand.

Yet if you try, I'll still read on...

Since I am with the banned. 

I give myself lots of poetry prompts and challenges, though it's rare I share the results here. However, I liked how this one started with the phrase "I'm with the banned" and ended up where it ended up. Plus... it's timely since it is, indeed, Banned Books Week.

It's also Poetry Friday, and this week's Poetry Friday roundup is over at Laura Salas' Writing the World for Kids. I hope you'll go check it out.

And if you want to get all my poems emailed to you for freeee as they hit the blog, enter your email address in the box below then click subscribe!

KidLitCon is Done and Gone....

As I always have in the past, I had a great time at this year's KidLitCon. From a publisher's preview at Little, Brown (boy do they have a lot of good books a-coming) to a dinner gathering with the fabulous Grace Lin speaking to the conference and to KidLit Drinks night at the end of it all, there was nary a dull or bad moment from my perspective.

A big part of that, of course, is the wonderful people you meet when you hang out with bloggers in the kidlitosphere. I mean, really, these are my peeps! Too many great people to list them all, though it's always fantastic to see Mother Reader and Liz Burns again. And Maureen (attendee of all six kidlitcons!). And... and... and!

And this year... oh my... I met Leila from Bookshelves of Doom! Oh, and Alex from The Children's War. And... you get the idea.

I had a fabulous lunch with Kellie Celia of Walden Pond Press, Mary Ann Scheuer of Great Kid Books (whose children's app knowledge is fantastic, too), and blogger/librarian Brenda Kahn. These be some mighty smart people!

I saw great presentations, of course, and enjoyed Maureen Johnson and Robin Wasserman giving the oddest "keynote speech" I've ever seen... yet one perfectly in keeping with KidLitCon's very essence.

I also gave a presentation called Avoiding the Echo Chamber: Bringing the World of Children's Literature to the World. You can read my own recap of it on the Happy Accident, and if that's not enough (or even if it is!), you can check out School Library Journal's take on it, too.

Good times, and huge thanks to Betsy Bird (who wrote a fab recap), Monica Edinger, and Liz Burns for putting the whole thing together. I can't wait til next year, wherever KidLitCon might be!

Tomorrow's #kidlitchat is all about School Visits

For those of you who might be interested, I wanted to let you know that this week's #kidlitchat will be all about school visits. Got ideas or questions or stories to tell? Come join us!

#kidlitchat is held every Tuesday at 9 PM Eastern/6 PM Pacific on Twitter. For information about Twitter chats and joining in, I highly recommend Debbie Ridpath Ohi's article about chats for writers.

(Then, unrelated to chatting, I recommend congratulating her on her first picture book, I'm Bored, launching (and being reviewed in the New York Times by David Small!).)

 Hope to see you on Twitter on Tuesday!

A Kitchen Mystery - a cooking poem/a messy poem

A Kitchen Mystery
by
Greg Pincus

You’re asking who did this?
Well, Mom, I don’t know.
I don't even have a good guess.
Who'd leave the oven encrusted with goop
Or the counters in such a big mess?
I don't have a clue why there's flour in my hair
Or how frosting has turned my shirt plaid,
But really, I... what?
You demand that I guess?
Well, fine....
It must have been Dad.


This week's Poetry Friday Roundup is over at Random Noodling. Head on over and check it out!

And if you want to get all my poems emailed to you for freeee as they hit the blog, enter your email address in the box below then click subscribe!

The Homophoem - a New (to me) Form

Over at The Miss Rumphius Effect, today's poetry stretch comes courtesy of current Children's Poet Laureate J. Patrick Lewis... and it's a new-to-me form called the homophoem which uses, can you guess, homophones!

You can see some examples from Pat as well as poems in the comments (including mine, as well as from Douglas Florian and Kate Coombs (and is that Kenn Nesbitt, too?)) if you head on over.

Why knot leave won of you're own homophoems their ore hear?

Join Me in NYC for Kidlitcon 2012!

I'm excited to be going back to Kidlitcon after a two year absence. I hope some or ALL of you - yes, all!!!! - will be joining me for the fun. The conference itself is Saturday, September 29th in New York City. And , the conference is FREE. Yes, you read that right. You can register here.

Kidlitcon is an annual gathering of children's and YA bloggers... though it's open to ANYONE. It's a great place for authors and illustrators to learn about what book bloggers are thinking and doing... and vice versa. And if I were a publisher based in NYC, I'd send a lot of my staff to meet folks and listen and try to understand where value can be created in this space... and where it can't.

The schedule has been posted... and, lookie there! I'm speaking about avoiding the children's literature echo chamber. This is a bit ironic, as I'm flying across country to hang out with bloggers and authors and librarians in the children's literature world, of course, but I think it's a critical topic. Or put another way...

Those 100 million folks on Twitter? A huge number of them are potential allies, fans, supporters, word-spreaders, and book buyers. When we ignore this and only talk among ourselves, I think we miss out on a great opportunity.

Beyond that, there are fantastic talks and panels (some at the same time as me, even), and a keynote address from Maureen Johnson! Awesome stuff thanks to the conference organizers. And did I mention that all you have to do is register, cuz it's free?

Hope to see you there!

Video. Poetry. Song. It's all good.

I wanted to share a video a friend of mine put together, as I think it's poetic in the best sense of the word. The video features parents of kids with disabilities offering up what they might have told themselves on the day their child was diagnosed. Powerful stuff, I must say.




This week's Poetry Friday roundup is over at Sylvia Vardell's Poetry for Children. You'll find all sorts of goodies over there (including a book I'm thrilled to be a part of and which you'll see more about here soooooon!).

Newsworthy Poem Redirect!

I didn't realize that today was the conclusion of the Reinvention of the Toilet Fair (with a winner announced today). Here at GottaBook, I'm always ahead of the news trends, ya see...

So, I point you back to my poem The Evolution of the Toilet (A Brief History).

Will I have to rewrite it? Here's hoping!

It's That Time of Year Again! (With a Tweetup!)

I am not actually going to be an attendee at the now sold-out SCBWI Summer Conference here in LA, but as a local, I will be coming by and hanging out, at least a little. I'm not attending because I can't actually be there the whole time - a disappointment on multiple levels. Still, I'll get there... and I hope to see YOU!

I suspect you can find me in the hotel lobby a lot, but you most certainly can on Friday night from 8:30 to 9:30 for a #kidlitchat Tweetup. Yes, it's time for us all to meet in person (or see each other again). Hopefully, by doing this Friday night, folks will have a richer weekend cuz they'll know the, oh... 100+ others at the conference who have also come by #kidlitchat.

By that hour, I doubt many of us will still be tweeting, so just look for a chatting crowd or me or Bonnie Adamson and jump on in.

Oh, and for those Tweeting the Con or hoping to follow along at home... the Conference tag is #LA12SCBWI.

Hope to see you there, whenever I get there!

A Late Bird Giveaway for Poetry Friday...

It's Poetry Friday, and I'm still trying to catch up from days of no internet and everything in boxes... so rather than a new poem, I decided to give a copy of The Late Bird away over on Facebook. All you gotta do is "like" or comment on the post by 7 PM California time today, and you could win! Wheeee!

The Poetry Friday roundup is over at A Teaching Life today. Lots o' good stuff to check out, so I hope you do!

The Blogger Posts Unhappily

There's no mystery as to why I post unhappily today - Donald J. Sobol, author of the Encyclopedia Brown books has passed away.

I was not a huge, huge reader as a kid, but Leroy Brown, Sally Kimball and Bugs Meany were definitely a big part of what I did read. I still remember the solutions/clues to so many mysteries (the baby gurgled happily (and he wouldn't have if the bad guy truly had just driven his car, cuz then his hood would be hot); squirrels don't back down trees; a blind man wouldn't turn on the light to read a newspaper), and it's been decades since I've read them.

Since we just moved, I had packed up all my old books again. This time around, I purged a lot (all to happy homes, so no worries), but I didn't get rid of the Encyclopedia Brown books. And that's simply because the child read happily... and over and over and over again!

So thanks, Donald J. Sobol. I never knew you, but I am part of the legacy you left behind. And now, I look forward to Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Afterlife!

On The Move, and That's No Fib

I'm about to go silent here for a handful of days. Why? MOVING! And no internet at the new place for a spell! Mind you, I still can check in, but posting? No. (By the way, as a moving present, feel free to get The Late Bird back to number one on the Kindle children's poetry charts. Thank you :-). Nook purchases of The Late Bird are always encouraged, too.).

Moving, even though we're still in Los Angeles, is a big stressful thang. Lotta changes coming, but some things don't change. Such as what, Greg? How about...


the fib review! This is issue twelve that the fine folks at Muse-Pie Press have put together, and the contributing poets this time around once again demonstrate that constraints of form don't have to mean constraints on poetics. Great stuff, as always. I hope you'll check it out. It's great (and amazingly free) reading.

The Poetry Friday roundup is at the Opposite of Indifference today. Enjoy the reads! And I'll leave you with a non-poetic but very fitting fib of my own....

Pack.
Pack!
Pack! Pack!
Pack, pack, pack.
Pack. Pack, pack, pack. Pack!
Sweet. All done. What? Oh. Pack! Pack! Pack!

See y'all next week....

As Always... It's All About ME!!!!

OK, fine. It's actually about me and Katie Davis talking children's poetry, Fibs, social media, self-publishing e-books, and more on her podcast, Brain Burps About Books.

I hope you give a listen... and check out the library of Katie's other podcasts, too. Many, many fabulous guests not named Greg Pincus, I assure you!

What's that? What about a little more poetic me today? Well, sure!  Linda over at TeacherDance has posted a lovely review of the Late Bird! (And you can look in her April Archives and enjoy some of her own poetry, too, plus a poetrypalooza of posts). Thanks, Linda!

It's also Poetry Friday, with the roundup over at the Paper Tigers blog (a must-read blog for multicultural book info in the children's space, by the way). There, no doubt, it won't be all about me... but I'm sure it'll still be good :-)

That Bird... It Keeps Flapping!

It's been a busy month here, I must say, and I just today checked back in on my e-book, The Late Bird, to see what's up. And guess what? It's still selling! More specifically, it's selling on Kindle but not so much on Nook.

This answers the biggest question I had before I launched: if I don't talk about it, will anyone find it? I think I've tweeted about it once this month, done no blog touring in June and... well... nothing else. And no, it's not still #1 on the Kindle Children's Poetry charts, but it is still being found. This makes me happy.

Over at the Happy Accident. when I return from a blogging haitus in July, I'll have much more about the hows and whys of what's happened to date. But in the meantime... thanks to all who have bought or spread the word!

It Takes One to Know One - a whining poem/a complaining poem

It Takes One to Know One
by
Greg Pincus

Oh, my. Oh, my. How I hate when you whine.
You moan and complain although everything’s fine.
You’re simply a whiner. I find you a pain.
Please be more like me. See – I never complain.

It's summer vacation time here, so there's no whining, I tell you! It's also Poetry Friday, and Amy LudwigVanderwater has the roundup over at The Poem Farm.

And if you want to get all my new poems (and only the poems) emailed to you for freeee as they hit the blog, enter your email address in the box below then click subscribe!

Summer Reading Lists/Suggestions?

Ahhh, summer. Time when minutes, moments, and occasionally even hours pop up when it's time to read, read, read. So... who's got great suggestions for me? Or who can point me to great reading lists you've found online?

I'm curious... and the library and bookstores have been missing me lately!

My Friend Kim - a friendship poem/an androgynous poem

My Friend Kim
by
Greg Pincus

My best friend is androgynous.
Goes by the name of Kim.
Clothes and style are meaningless...
I'll always care for her.
Or him!


Sometimes I wonder "huh. What age is that poem for?" This is is one of these times....

The Poetry Friday roundup is up over at Carol's Corner. Go on by and a check it out.

And if you want to get all my new poems (and only the poems) emailed to you for freeee as they hit the blog, enter your email address in the box below then click subscribe!