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!