Category: community

African American Genealogy Conference

- Stacy

This Saturday, March 12, from 1–4 p.m., my church is sponsoring a genealogical conference focusing on African American genealogical research. I’ll be teaching one of the breakout sessions, Top Ten Tips for Getting Started in Genealogy. They’re bringing in a well-renowned speaker who’s an expert in this field, but I can’t find my flier to tell you who he is (I’ll edit this later if I do—his credentials were impressive). I believe he had something to do with the opening up of the Freedmen’s Bureau records for family history research. I’ll be focusing on methodology—making sure you cover all your bases. That can get pretty tricky in African American research in particular, depending on what area of the country your family is from, how well their records were kept, and at what point you either leave the country, hit slavery, or both. This is complicated by many Southern records being destroyed during the Civil War and our country’s history of institutional racism, which sometimes affects the quality of census and vital records. We’ll start with the basics, and then talk about some places to go that might not be as “easy” as the census but might bear more fruit in individual circumstances.

There will also be a simultaneous workshop that will let people get individualized attention if they’re beyond the basics.

If you’re in the New York City area and interested in getting started on your family history, or if you’ve been stumped at some point and want to get back into it, come on up to Harlem this Saturday.

Harlem LDS Chapel

306 Malcolm X Blvd
New York, NY 10027

Saturday, March 12

1–4 p.m.

ETA: Aha! I found the flier with the speaker information, and yep, it’s pretty cool. He’s from the National Archives. Here’s the flier and more info:

Reginald Washington is an archivist and genealogy specialist at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). A frequent lecturer and published author, he testified before Congress in support of The Freedmen’s Bureau Preservation Act of 2000, which provided three million dollars for the preservation of Freedmen’s Bureau records.

Mr. Washington’s keynote address will discuss the use, availability and the value of the Southern Claims Commission‘s case files for African American Genealogical research.  He will also provide information on how to utilize the resources found at the National Archives and Records Administration office in Washington DC.

Attendees can also choose to attend two of the following workshops:

  • Freedmen’s Bureau Marriage Records
  • African-American Research: Geographical Resource Tutorial
  • “Top 10 Tips for Getting Started on Genealogy”
  • Interactive Work Session – exploring www.familysearch.org

Free and open to the public you can register by emailing HarlemAAGC@gmail.com

or in person the day of the conference

Life, the Universe, and Everything

- Stacy 8 Comments

Between the holidays, a nasty bout of the flu, and being busy with preparing Fall books for design and getting next spring’s books well on their way, I haven’t had much time to even think about what I’d post here lately. If you’re interested in my flittering day-to-day thoughts, follow me on Twitter—it’s not much more there lately, but it’s more!

I pop in here today to let you know about Life, the Universe, & Everything 29: The Marion K. “Doc” Smith Symposium on Science Fiction and Fantasy. I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about it in previous years—it’s one of the best little cons I’ve ever been to. It’s a local convention run by BYU students and Utah Valley residents who are fantasy & SF buffs. In recent years, it’s always been free. This year, they decided to charge a nominal amount so that the budget woes they’ve had to deal with (the previous venue required them to offer it for free) will be solved. But $20 still isn’t that much for a 2 or 3-day convention, and if you’re a BYU student/staff/faculty, you still get in free.

ETA: It’s not just BYU students, I’m told, that get in free. It’s anyone with a student ID, including other colleges and younger kids w/ student IDs for high school, for example. An email recently went out that if you home school, there are ways to show that too.

What will you get for your $20? Pretty much the best that Utah has to offer in science fiction and fantasy—and that’s saying a lot. James Dashner, the author of The Maze Runner, will be the Guest of Honor. My friends, authors Brandon Sanderson and Dan Wells always go (though I don’t see Brandon on the schedule, so something may have come up for him), as well as webcomic artist Howard Tayler (the Writing Excuses trifecta). Tracy Hickman, Jessica Day George, Mette Ivie Harrison, Bree Despain, Janci Olds (who has a book forthcoming from Macmillan), Eric James Stone, Robert J. Defendi, Rebecca Shelley, John Brown, Larry Correia, Julie Wright, Robison Wells, Jake Black…

I know I missed somebody there. Oh—ME!

And it doesn’t matter if you’re an aspiring writer, a pro, or a fan—there’s something there for everyone.

Once my schedule is pinned down a little tighter, I’ll post it here. You’ve got a month to plan–if you’re in Utah (or want to take a trip there), plan for Feb. 17-19 at BYU. It’s no longer in the Wilkinson Center–it’s now hosted by Conferences and Workshops. Register here (or give them a call at the number on that page). That means better parking, even if there are fewer easy lunch options in the Conference Center on campus.

Hope to see you in Feb.!

Whitney Award nominations

- Stacy 3 Comments

The Whitney Awards are a fairly new award given out at the LDS Storymakers conference that honors novels written by LDS writers, both in the niche LDS market and in the national market. Every year, you can nominate titles for the committee to read and vote upon.

They’ve started to announce the books that have gotten enough nominations to be considered “official nominees”—these are the books that will be considered and whittled down to finalists.

You don’t have to be LDS to nominate books, but the author or authors do need to be members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a fact that’s hard to determine sometimes when looking at books published for the national market. I have a particular interest in the Speculative and Young Readers (mislabeled Young Adult) categories, given my interests, and while several good books have been nominated, I think that several haven’t made the list for official nominations yet that ought to be.

So, if you have an interest in books by LDS authors published in 2010 that aren’t already official nominations—see the Rules page here for criteria; note that books for young readers need to be at least 20,000 words long and novels for adults need to be 50,000 words long—please feel free to pop over and nominate, especially if you know for a fact that a particular writer is LDS that hasn’t ever been considered for the award. As I said, sometimes it’s hard to determine if an author qualifies; I hate to just assume that someone with ties to BYU is LDS, because I knew plenty of non-Mormons while there as a student, and there are quite a few LDS authors who never lived in Utah or went to BYU as well. Sometimes bios don’t include that information, for obvious reasons—it’s not a professional credit to announce your church affiliation.

Remember, this is just the preliminary nomination—books of merit that should be considered. From there, the committee will whittle each category down to five finalists, and then (I’m fuzzy on the process, but they outline it on their site) will vote on which ones get the awards. So, in my opinion, the list of nominees should be pretty long.

In case anyone was wondering, below are the titles I nominated, to ensure that a large range get considered. I didn’t re-nominate anything that had already had enough votes to get on the list. If you like these books, consider nominating them, or others published last year by LDS authors. My list focuses on the national market, because that’s the market I know best, but you can also nominate books published in the LDS market (sold in LDS bookstores and catalogs).

I had several nominations. This first was for debut novel, but I’m not sure if the author is actually LDS. She has some affiliation with BYU and lives in Utah, but as we all know, that doesn’t mean she is. If anyone can confirm or deny (privately), I can let the committee know.

  • Kristin Chandler, Wolves, Boys, and Other Things that Might Kill Me, Viking

In speculative and/or young readers:

  • James Dashner, The Scorch Trials, Random House (YA or speculative)
  • Ally Condie, Matched, Dutton (it comes out at the end of this month; I’ve read an ARC)
  • James A. Owen, The Dragon’s Apprentice, Simon & Schuster
  • Aprilynne Pike, Spells, HarperTeen
  • Becca Fitzpatrick, Crescendo, Simon & Schuster
  • Mette Ivie Harrison, The Princess & the Snowbird, Bloomsbury
  • Bree Despain, The Lost Saint, Egmont (it comes out Dec. 28; what with the cutoff being so late but the nominations coming so early, I wonder if her Dark Divine ever got nominated for debut last year?)
  • Carol Lynch Williams, Glimpse, Paula Wiseman Books/S&S
  • Julie Berry, Secondhand Charm, Bloomsbury

Meeting authors, Kitty Saturday

- Stacy

I haven’t had a chance yet to post about my time at the Ventura/Santa Barbara SCBWI conference over Halloween weekend. I had a great time—the organizers, including Lee & Low author Alexis O’Neill, the V/SB SCBWI RA, were extremely organized, and it was so nice to meet so many authors and illustrators who are either currently published and working on more books, or who are working toward publication. The other guests, Reuben Pfeffer (agent at East-West Literary Agency) and Andrea Welch (Beach Lane Books) were so nice to talk to. It was a lot to fit a lot into one day! But the organizers were able to do it because they kept everyone on track time-wise.

I had my camera with me, but didn’t take many shots. But one thing I did get a shot of was a milestone that any editor would count as a highlight: getting to meet one of my authors for the first time in person. This time it was Karen Sandler, whose book, Tankborn, will be out with Tu in fall 2011. (And I finally met her agent just this Thursday when we and my coworker Miriam met for hot chocolate at Burdick’s—it makes me happy that Burdick’s opened a New York shop just in time for me to move here. I was in love with their Boston shop when I was in graduate school.)

So here’s me and Karen in California on the day before Halloween:

And just for good measure, we haven’t had some good pictures of my cats around here recently, so here’s a whole buncha cute fluffies for ya.

Resources for writers: Links for reflecting on white privilege and writing the Other

- Stacy 1 Comment

I promised the writers of the Ventura/Santa Barbara SCBWI that I’d post the list of resources I flashed at them at the end of my talk so they’d be able to actually reference them. These should also have been emailed out to the local listservs, but for those who aren’t on those listservs, and I’m sure this list will be of use for anyone thinking about writing someone who is, as Ursula Le Guin says, “a being who is different from yourself. This being can be different from you in its sex; or in its annual income; or in its way of speaking and dressing and doing things; or in the color of its skin, or the number of its legs and heads.” I can’t help but add for that last item: this is speculative fiction we’re talking about, after all. (That’s from her book mentioned below, The Language of the Night, in the essay “American SF and the Other”—a GREAT read for anyone thinking about these issues.)

Nisi Shawl’s Writing the Other—both a workshop and a book
“Appropriate Cultural Appropriation” by Nisi Shawl
“Transracial Writing for the Sincere” by Nisi Shawl
Le Guin, Ursula K. “American SF and the Other,” The Language of the Night. New York: HarperCollins, 1979/1989. (Out of print—your best bet is your local library/interlibrary loan or finding it online used.)
Le Guin, Ursula K. “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” The Language of the Night. New York: HarperCollins, 1979/1989.
“Being Poor” by John Scalzi
“Things I Don’t Have to Think about Today” by John Scalzi  paired with his next post on narrative usurpation, covering why he wrote the previous post

A Is for Anansi, NY Comic Con, and TANKBORN

- Stacy 2 Comments

Last weekend I went to the excellent A Is for Anansi conference at NYU, and met a lot of thoughtful people who want to make the world a better place for African American kids. I took a lot of notes and would like to share them at some point, but I’m in the midst of finishing an edit and have only popped online, so I’ll have to do it some other time. In the meantime, Hannah in Lee & Low’s marketing department took some great notes that she shares here.

I cut out from that conference a little early to pop by New York Comic Con over at the Javitz Center, and the best way I can find to describe it is CROWDED. Apparently something like 90,000 people went over the course of the weekend, but I believe most of them were there Saturday between 1 and 4. Got to see my friends Brandon and Emily Sanderson for a few minutes while Brandon was signing books in the midst of a madhouse (we caught up later in less crowded circumstances), wandered around the significantly less-crowded Artist Alley for a while, said hi to some old Wizards of the Coast coworkers at the Wizards booth, and then the crowds got to me and I made my escape. It helped that I was also in the midst of a Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood marathon on Hulu at home, and watching that sounded much more appealing than shoving through crowds and not really seeing anything. I took my camera with me to take pictures of the costumes—and there were some really good ones—but there wasn’t any room to get a good candid shot, so I didn’t bother. Sorry–blog posts are always more fun with pictures. (I’ve taken a number of pictures lately, but haven’t had the time to actually upload them online.)

Thirdly, and BEST of all, I can finally announce our third acquisition at Tu Books, making our third book and rounding out the Fall 2011 season! As reported in PW Children’s Bookshelf yesterday:

Stacy Whitman at Lee & Low Books bought North American rights to Tankborn by Karen Sandler, for publication in fall 2011 as part of the Tu Books imprint launch list. The dystopian YA title is about best friends Kayla and Mishalla, genetically engineered slaves on the planet Loka, whose developing friendships with higher-status boys lead them to question the strict caste system of their world. Sandler has written more than 17 adult romance titles; this is her first YA. Lindsay Ribar and Matt Bialer at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates brokered the deal.

I’m SO EXCITED. The lineup for Tu for Fall 2011 is going to be awesome. We’ve got a YA paranormal thriller (I call it Burn Notice with werewolves), a middle grade space adventure (Olympics in space), and a YA dystopian with two main characters you’re going to love. As time goes on, I’ll be able to tell you more about Wolf Mark, Galaxy Games, and Tankborn; for now, the teasers will have to suffice!

Speaking of which, as I said, I’m in the midst of an edit that I’m trying to get back to the author before I leave for the weekend. Have a good one!

Ursula K. Le Guin: “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?”

- Stacy 1 Comment

I’ve been reading Ursula Le Guin’s collection of essays, The Language of the Night, and found her 1974 essay “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” just as relevant today as it ever was back then. In our post-Harry Potter world, perhaps we’re a little less afraid of fantasy as a culture, but her point remains cogent, given the backlash against Harry Potter and his ilk, too. Here’s an excerpt:

For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.

This freedom she speaks of is that of the imagination, the ability to believe in things you know not to be real:

So I believe that we should trust our children. Normal children do not confuse reality and fantasy—they confuse them much less often than we adults do (as a certain great fantasist pointed out in a story called “The Emperor’s New Clothes”). Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books. All too often, that’s more than Mummy and Daddy know; for, in denying their childhood, the adults have denied half their knowledge, and are left with the sad, sterile little fact: “Unicorns aren’t real.” And that fact is one that never got anybody anywhere (except in the story “The Unicorn in the Garden,” by another great fantasist, in which it is shown that a devotion to the unreality of unicorns may get you straight into the loony bin). It is by such statements as, “Once upon a time there was a dragon,” or “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”—it is by such beautiful non-facts that we fantastic human beings may arrive, in our peculiar fashion, at the truth.

Unfortunately, the essay isn’t online to link to the rest of it, but do look up The Language of the Night at your local library (it doesn’t appear to still be in print, but used copies are going for anywhere from 75 cents on Half.com to $151 on Amazon). I’m still working my way through—each essay is fascinating. Working my way up to “American SF and the Other,” which is the reason I checked the book out from the library.

ETA: A blogger whose post on this essay is one of the top Google results posted the results of a Q & A with Le Guin last year that addresses her thoughts on where we are today.

Save Shannon Hale’s life

- Stacy 1 Comment

Via Rick Walton:

If you are the highest bidder, Shannon Hale will rave about you on her blog, describing in great detail how you saved her life several times.

All money goes to buy books for kids who need them.

To bid and to have Shannon put in writing that she is forever in your debt, go to Writing for Charity.

Or you can be murdered by Dan Wells. In his book of course.

Online bidding ends Friday night.

Scary middle grade books

- Stacy 4 Comments

I have a friend whose 11-year-old daughter likes scary books. She asks:

Hoping maybe you can help. My daughter who will be 11 in a few months enjoys reading scary books, for example All The Lovely Bad Ones. Do you have any good ones in mind that I could send her way?

I have a lot of suggestions for good middle grade with suspenseful action, but not as many for truly scary horror/ghost story kinds of books. If she’s already outgrown R.L. Stine’s books but isn’t ready for the plethora of paranormal and horror published for teens, I’m sure there are still plenty of scary books for her, but I’m coming up blank. I have a few suggestions, but hopefully the comments will yield more.

  • Skeleton Man and its sequels (I believe there are 5 now), Joseph Bruchac

(In fact, that’s the only one I could think of today–I’ll look at my shelves at home again tonight; hopefully others will come to mind.) I’ve also included suggestions from Child_Lit subscribers, with quotes about their read annotated if it would make a difference in choosing the book.*

  • Shadowed Summer, Saundra Mitchell (Child_Lit: “A delicious ghost story. Only caveat: heavy on metaphors and similes. Some readers might find it too much.”)
  • Halloween Night: Twenty-One Spooktacular Poems (Child_Lit: “scary-funny poems”)
  • The Crossroads and The Hanging Hill Chris Grabenstein
  • Revenge of the Witch (The Last Apprentice series), Joseph Delaney, and its sequels
  • Coraline, Neil Gaiman
  • The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman
  • The Witches, Roald Dahl
  • The House with the Clock in its Walls, John Bellairs, and its sequels
  • The Ghost Belonged to Me and Ghosts I Have Been, Richard Peck
  • Boots and Pieces, The Curse of Cuddles McGee, and Night of the Living Lawn Ornaments, Emily Ecton

Edited to add:

  • Wait Till Helen Comes, Mary Downing Hahn
  • The Prince of Mist, Carlos Ruiz Zafon (Child_Lit: quite creepy. I’d say it would be
    of interest to older intermediate/younger YA readers; the main character is
    thirteen.)
  • Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Alvin Schwartz (Child_Lit: These books have always been a delightful read in the classrooms I have worked in.  Parents (even the really conservative Christian parents) have enjoyed the stories and books as much as the children have.  The images in the book are a bit on the scary side and I encourage parents to read the text before looking at the pictures (which will stay with kids long after they read the book).  Stephen Gammell does a bone-chilling job in his artwork.  The books keep the folklore tradition alive.)
  • The Ghost of Crutchfield Hall, Mary Downing Hahn, the same author of All the Lovely Bad Ones (Child_Lit: It had some marvelous fictional sleight of hand in the end, so just when you think it’s going to slide to a predictable ending, a new twist reaches out with chilly fingers to grab you!)
  • Wait Till Helen Comes, Mary Downing Hahn (Child_Lit: wonderfully scary. Much scarier than All the Lovely Bad Ones.)
  • Jane-Emily, Patricia Clapp
  • A Candle In Her Room, Ruth M. Arthur
  • Breathe, Cliff McNish
  • The Intruders, E.E. Richardson
  • Deep and Dark and Dangerous, Hahn
  • Skeleton Creek and Ghost in the Machine
  • The Dollhouse Murders
  • The Ghost of Fossil Glen, Cynthia DeFelice
  • Stonewords, Conford
  • The Proof that Ghosts Exist, The Curse of the Evening Eye, and The Hunt for the Haunted Elephant, Perry Nodelman and Carol Matas
  • The Owl Service, Alan Garner

I’ll add more to the list as suggestions come in.

* Some comments have been edited for brevity.