ALA Annual Conference, Chicago: Book Signing at Charlesbridge

In the Charlesbridge booth at ALA with Editor Karen Boss

On Saturday and Sunday, June 24th and 25th, I attended the American Library Association annual conference in Chicago, Illinois, held at the huge McCormick Center in downtown Chicago. On Saturday I cruised the hundreds of booths in the exhibit hall looking at the new books, collecting posters and a few books, chatting with editors and promotion people, and meeting other authors. That evening I was pleased to meet up with author Dori Hillestad Butler, other authors, and librarians at the grand reception put on by the Junior Library Guild at the famous Chicago Art Institute. (Hatching Chicks in Room 6 was a JLG selection this year.) After refreshments we were invited to browse the galleries and I became reacquainted with some of the museum's most famous paintings including George Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte, Vincent Van Gogh's Bedroom at Arles and a number of Claude Monet's haystack paintings. I have fond memories of visiting the museum when I was in college and art school in Iowa (we rode to Chicago on the train) and haven't been back since, so it was a delight to visit again. The museum has grown enormously with several additional modern wings. Thanks to JLG for a lovely event!
On Sunday morning I signed Hatching Chicks in Room 6 in the Charlesbridge booth and was pleased with the number of people who stopped by and bought books. Many of them told me stories of hatching chicks both at home in their schools. Clearly, it is a popular project, not just in kindergarten, but in all grades. Thanks to everyone in the Charlesbridge booth for helping the signing go smoothly! I had a great ALA!

Caroline Arnold Books at TeachingBooks.Net

I recently met (via email) Nick Glass, the founder and Executive Director of Teaching Books.net, through a mutual friend who noticed that both of us are graduates of Grinnell College in Iowa (not in the same year so we did not overlap). I hadn’t looked at the TeachingBooks site for a while and when I checked out my page I was pleased to discover that it lists seventeen of my books with a total of 75 resources, including five book guides and lesson plans. I learned that more than 33,000 schools use TeachingBooks to access materials about what they are reading. What a great resource for teachers and librarians! It is a subscription service, but you can get a taste of what it offers with a trial two week membership.
I look forward to stopping by the TeachingBooks booth at the American Library Association conference in Chicago, June 22-27, 2017.

SAVE THE DATE! ALA Chicago: Signing in the Charlesbridge Booth, Sunday, June 25 at 10:00

SAVE THE DATE!
If you are going to be at the American Library Association Conference in Chicago, June 22-27, 2017, I will be signing my new book Hatching Chicks in Room 6 in Room 6 at the Charlesbridge booth #3522 on Sunday, June 25th at 10:00 a.m. Please stop by! I'd love to see you!

HATCHING CHICKS IN ROOM 6 at the Pioneer Bookshop in Grinnell, Iowa

On my recent trip to Grinnell, Iowa, for a college reunion, I stopped in at the college bookstore, the Pioneer Bookshop, now located in historic downtown Grinnell, to show them my new book, Hatching Chicks in Room 6. I was delighted to discover that they had already ordered it and put it on the shelf. I then went down the street to the town library, in a beautiful large building, new since my last visit to Grinnell, and found out that they had also already ordered it for their collection. (The old library building is now used as an art gallery.) I had a nice chat with the children's librarian who told me that she loves using my books in her story hour. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that a book about eggs and hatching chicks is popular in a community surrounded by farms and which owes its history to a tradition of farming. It seems like the perfect place for my book.