Authors & Audiences Caroline Leech

 PART THREE – THE SCHOOL VISITS SERIES – EXTENDED EPISODE


Joy Preble is both a successful YA author, and the Children’s Programming Director at Brazos Bookstore in Houston. Her first picture book, Lost and Found Hanukkah, will be published in 2025 by Chronicle Books.


Melissa Buron is one of Houston Independent School District’s Library Media Specialists. She is also an author and illustrator, and in 2016, created her own publishing company, Mab Media, a boutique publishing company specializing in fantasy, fairy tales, and folktales.

This is the third episode of my mini-series on School Visits, and you can listen to the other episodes here:
Episode 22 - MG debut author and teacher, Lisa Stringfellow
Episode 24 - YA & MG author, Scott Reintgen


If you are planning your own school visits, don’t forget to request the SCHOOL VISITS 101, the guide to school visits which Scott Reintgen have put together just for you.


You can find out more about Joy and all her books at www.joypreble.com, and find her book recommendations on the Brazos Bookstore website. You can also follow her on Instagram and Twitter.

You can find Melissa at her publishing company, Mab Media, and she is on Instagram and Twitter. Melissa and her colleagues in the Library Services team at Houston ISD can also be found on Facebook.

We also talked about:

Tae Keller's interview on Authors & Audiences

Keir Graff's Phantom Tower and his school visits
 Alana  Arnold's Harriet Series and her school visits

And two Paris bookstores:
Shakespeare and Company
The Red Wheelbarrow/The Red Balloon
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PART TWO – THE SCHOOL VISITS SERIES – EXTENDED EPISODE
Scott Reintgen is a young adult and middle grade author, who specializes in writing fantasy and science fiction. His tenth novel, A Door in the Dark, which came out this week from Simon & Schuster, is the first installment of his Waxwings series. His other series are the Nyxia Triad and Ashlords series, as well as the Talespinners series and the Celia Cleary series for middle graders. 
     A former English and creative writing teacher in North Carolina, Scott has done over 500 school visits since he debuted in 2017. With so much experience, he has developed the process of doing author visits to schools – virtually and in-person – into not so much an art, but more a science. So in this extended Part Two episode of the Authors & Audiences School Visit series, Scott shares his incredible knowledge and strategies, including pitching visits, collaboration with bookstores, pricing and librarians.
     You can follow Scott on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter
     Order your copy of Scott’s new book A Door in the Dark – out this week from Simon and Schuster – by using this link to Scott’s favorite indie bookstore, Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh NC.
    Get our free downloadable tip sheet, SCHOOL VISITS 101, by clicking here.
     Scott’s book recommendation were:
Gallant by V.E. SchwabThe House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune     You can listen to Part One of this School Visits series in episode #22, an interview with middle grade author, Lisa Stringfellow  
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Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton is an internationally-known writer, librettist, educator, activist and performer. She began as a slam poet, competing regularly in national poetry slams, and was even voted one of the top performance poets in the world. In 2017, she was the first African American to be appointed as Poet Laureate of Houston, In 2019 her poetry collection, Newsworthy, won huge acclaim, and her memoir, Black Chameleon, is out this week from Harold Holt. Deborah has also taken her poetry and artistry into other artforms – opera, ballet and most recently visual arts - using those new opportunities to lift up women and to celebrate their stories, whether those stories were well known or not.

International Women's Day  is celebrated today, March 8th, 2023, and is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. The first National Women's Day was celebrated in the US in 1909,  and it became International Women's Day in 1911. To mark the centenary in 2011, March was declared as Women's History Month by US President Barack Obama.

Buy Deborah's new memoir, Black Chameleon: Memory, Womanhood, and Myth, from Kindred Stories, Brazos Bookstore, or the  Bookshop.org.
Watch Deborah's Poet Laureate response to Hurricane Harvey on BBC World News in 2017.

Deborah's book recommendations were:
Chrome Valley, a poetry collection by Mahogany Brown
Interior Chinatown, a novel by Charles Yu
A little devil in America, by Hanif Abdurraqib
You can find Deborah at:
Website - www.livelifedeep.com@livelifedeep on  Twitter, Instagram and Tiktok@LivingLifeDEEP on Facebook Please Rate, Review, & Subscribe to Authors & Audiences!
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To mark Black History Month, I talk this week to Lisa Stringfellow, whose debut middle-grade fantasy novel,  A Comb of Wishes, was published last February by HarperCollins/Quill Tree Books. The paperback came out this month, and it tells the story of a 12 year old Black girl as she deals with loss and longing.

A Comb of Wishes won Kweli Journal’s inaugural Color of Children’s Literature Manuscript Award in 2019, has received starred reviews, and just this week, Lisa learned that she is a finalist in the Superior Achievement in a Middle Grade Novel category of the Bram Stoker Awards 2022, voted on by members of the Horror Writers Association. 
Lisa also teaches English at a middle school in Boston, and so this episode marks the first of three shows in which we will look at the art and science behind Author School visits – how to get them, how to do them brilliantly, and hopefully, how to make some money from them.  Look out for episodes #24 and #25 for more on school visits.
 To find out more about Lisa, visit her website, or follow her on Instagram or Twitter.

To buy Lisa's debut MG novel, A Comb of Wishes, please consider buying it from her favorite indie bookstore, Brookline Booksmith. Or, to support other indie bookstores across the country, as well as this podcast through an affiliate link, please buy it from Bookshop.org.

Laurel also mentioned 
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Bestselling author L.A. Mitchell published her first story—a time travel short called THE LOST HIGHWAY—in 2008. Since then, she has published over 33 works of fiction and non-fiction as a ghostwriter. Her works include memoir, business non-fiction, self-help, young adult, women’s fiction, and—most prevalently—romance.

Spotlights have been turned recently on the craft of a ghostwriter following the publication of Prince Harry's autobiography, SPARE, by Penguin Random House. The prince readily acknowledges the involvement of "superstar ghostwriter", J.R. Moehringer, and yet many people have accused him of cheating because he didn't write the book himself. In this episode, experienced ghostwriter, L.A. Mitchell, pulls back the curtain on publishing's best kept secret, and shares her own processes for bringing someone else's voice to life. 

To find out more about Laura, visit her website, where you can sign up to both of her regular newsletters, or follow her on Instagram.

Published in her own name, Laura's new novel, FARTHERMOST - as she mentioned in the interview - is available on Kindle Vella, the new serialized story platform from Amazon, and you can read the first three episodes of FARTHERMOST for FREE here. 
FARTHERMOST: Five years past the End Times War, inside the bombed-out shell of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, seventeen-year-old Ronin Black discovers a portal to a secret realm where all of art’s masterpieces, from doodles to Degas, blend into a vast canvas of shared emotion. Together with a motley band of art misfits, this thief-turned-guardian discovers that the key to restoring humanity is closer than he imagined. New episodes on Thursdays and Sundays.
While me may never learn which books she has ghosted, she did mention how much she had enjoyed PACHINKO by Min Jin Lee, a National Book Award finalist. If you haven't yet read this amazing book, please consider buying it from from Bookshop.org - Laura's favorite bookstore in Denver, The Tattered Cover, will receive a small fee from any purchase using this link, which will go towards the costs of keeping the store running. Many thanks.
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Louise Marburg is the author of three short story collections – The Truth About Me, No Diving Allowed and her latest one, You have reached your Destination, which  came out in November. Her stories have also been published in any number of highly respected literary journals and she’s won awards for them too. Louise’s new collection captures turning points in the lives of twelve women, and Louise invites us to face ourselves and our own life journeys with sympathy, humor, and courage.

Louise originally trained as a designer at the Kansas City Art Institute, but then discovered that she wanted to write instead, and went on to get an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University.

During our discussion, Louise mentioned her recent article for The Daily Beast, entitled Are They Really Your Friends if They Don't Read Your Work?  She also praised Eleanor Lipman's novel Ms. Demeanor, and she recommended following Amy Sedaris on Instagram.

She will be presenting her new collection in Houston, TX, on Saturday, January 14th at an event at Brazos Bookstore where she will be in discussion with author, Chris Cander.
To find out more about Louise, visit her website, or follow her on Instagram.

To buy her latest book, You have reached your destination, or any of her other books, please consider buying it from from Bookshop.org - as an affiliate, Authors & Audiences will receive a small fee from any purchase using this link, which will go towards the costs of keeping the podcast running. Many thanks.


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