Chad's favorite book

Join us all month, beginning this week with Children's Book Week, as we feature favorite childhood books from our authors, illustrators, and staff!! 

Clockwise from top left: Chad age 2.5, book cover, Arnold Lobel, Arnold Lobel self portrait as pig

Small Pig (Harper & Row, 1969) by Arnold Lobel is one of my favorite books from childhood. I like it better than his more well-known and more celebrated books, such as Frog and Toad Are Friends, Mouse Soup, and Fables. Those are classics of the genre,  but Small Pig holds special meaning for me because it taught me that sometimes parents could be wrong and kids could be right. Plus I really liked that pig.

Small pig is the hero of the book, and he loves nothing better than sinking into good, soft mud at the end of a long day running around his farm. Farmer and his wife love the small pig and think he’s the best pig in the whole world. This makes small pig very happy.

But one day the farmer’s wife goes on a spring cleaning spree with her new vacuum cleaner and she goes outside and—whoosh!—sucks up small pig’s mud puddle! This makes the farmer’s wife happy but it upsets small pig greatly, and he decides to run away to find good, soft mud somewhere else.

Small pig visits many places but none of them have what he’s looking for. Finally he arrives at a big, polluted city where construction workers are pouring a new sidewalk. Small pig confuses the wet concrete for good, soft mud and sinks in, content at last.

When small pig realizes his mistake, he’s stuck fast in the sidewalk and a crowd of city dwellers have gathered around. How embarrassing for him! But to his surprise (and ours!) the farmer and his wife have been searching frantically for their beloved pig and driving through the city they stop to see what the crowd is gawking at. It’s their beloved small pig! They rescue him with the help of firemen with jackhammers and take him back to the farm where they give him all the good, soft mud he could ever want.

I loved and related to small pig. I remember feeling intense pleasure that he got to sink into his mud at night. To me, it felt like crawling in bed. I recall the anger I felt when the farmer and his wife cleaned away his mud. How unfair! How misunderstood he was! How at the mercy and whim of his unpredictable owners he was! I remember the fear and excitement I felt along with small pig, the sense of adventure and independence, as he made his way from farm to bog to junkyard to city. And of course I remember the relief I felt at his rescue. The love and understanding. The comfort of returning home and to having a little place to sink into at the end of a long day. I remember remembering all these feelings as I snuggled into my bed, falling asleep while my parents read this book.

Looking back at it, this book taught me that parents (or farmers) aren’t always perfect and that they make mistakes. It taught me that these mistakes can be honest ones. It taught me that kids (or small pigs) have legitimate complaints when they are misunderstood or taken for granted. That sometimes kids might want or need to run away (even if running away if just having some quiet time in your room). That running away is sometimes the only way to learn the true value of home. That parents (or farmers) can’t micromanage their young wards. That sometimes it’s best to compromise. And that home is the place that makes you feel good at the end of the day, like a warm bed or good, soft mud, or the sound of your parent’s voice softly reading you book after book until you fall asleep.

May 1-7, 2017: Children's Book Week!

Happy Children's Book Week from Penny Candy Books! Did you know that this is the 98th straight year that Children's Book Week has been celebrated in the US? It was founded in 1919 and predates the Newbery Medal (1922) and Caldecott Medal (1933). 

We have a lot in store for Children's Book Week this year, including blog posts about our favorite childhood books and what they've meant to us over the years. We have a super secret something on deck for Friday, too.

What will you do to celebrate CBW? Head over to http://everychildareader.net/cbw/ to see how you can celebrate children's books this week! 

Our newest title! NUVEAU: The Future of Patterns

We're so excited for this coloring book to hit the shelves. We've tested it on kids and adults, to rave reviews by both. Working with Tiffany (the artist) and Amy (director of SixTwelve with whom we teamed up to make this book possible), has been and continues to be a joy. The book is on its way as we speak and will be available to ship in early January. You can pre-order one (or five or ten) on our website now, or go to the party tomorrow night (in OKC) to grab one of our 100-or-so early copies, which Tiffany will sign! Check out this rad video for more:

On Mni Wiconi, Blood Run, and The Power (and Necessity) of Youth-Led Movements

photo credit: Travis Hedge Coke

photo credit: Redhawk from Standing Rock Rising Facebook Page

by Allison Adele Hedge Coke

We are proud to introduce Allison Adele Hedge Coke as a member of our Advisory Council at Penny Candy Books. Hedge Coke grew up in North Carolina, Texas, Canada, and the Great Plains region and is of Huron, Metis, French Canadian, Portuguese, English, Irish, Scot and mixed Southeastern Native heritage. She is an award-winning poet, teacher, and activist whose work the US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera recently honored with a Witter Bynner Fellowship.

Our Advisory Council members contribute their important voices to our conversations about race, diversity, and cultural awareness with the goal of helping us accomplish our mission—to create children's literature that reflects the diverse realities of the world we live in both at home and abroad—every single day.

We’re honored that Hedge Coke has raised her voice and shared this piece with us.

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This Mni Wiconi movement at Standing Rock (Sacred Stone, Red Warrior, Oceti Sakowin camps), on the Cannonball, is a youth-led movement in complete step with Black Elk's prophesy, where the youth will lead in the direst times. We are in those dire times, and they are leading. For those who aren’t familiar with the Mni Wiconi movement at Standing Rock, this short animated video by native filmmaker Joseph Erb is a great introduction.

I am a grandmother. A grandmother with the strong girl heart, maybe. When I fought for protection of Blood Run on the Big Sioux River in South Dakota, I was the only adult, the only citizen, who showed up at any of the hearings to testify. I was the only person still actively lobbying for that site's protection. No matter how I tried, my well-experienced lobbying peers believed it "a lost cause."

My Sioux Falls School District Office of Indian Ed students did not. They held hope, and they sent me with their stacks of letters wanting action, justice, truth, dignity, protection, respect. They/we wanted this site to be loved and honored. I was already a grandmother during the final successful phase of hearings, and my oldest granddaughters were born ten minutes from that site.

There was nothing in the curriculum, nor in the general public spectrum to designate any of the world heritage there, nor nothing of the many peoples who had millennia of experience and lives in that place, the very large ceremonial mound city nearly destroyed by the invaders in the territorial and railroad era and continued by settler-colonist descendants there still sadly looting the ancestral graves.

There was nothing for my granddaughters and nothing for my students. There had been decades and decades of intentional destruction of the place and its significance there. It was criminal erasure.

I performed testimony in the way of my own family, through the cadence of the song, and poetry of place, the prayers left there by so many generations of Indigenous people, the rhythm of memory and the cadence of truth.

In the traditional method of laying down symbolic proof in my testimony, the letters from my students upon the bench carried their truth, their hope, their histories, their love of this place, their call for its protection, and for truthful re-education of world significance in their curriculum, in the contemporary community, and protection for the graves still there, for returning those who had been illegally taken, and for the earthworks, the river, and all living creatures there and beyond that watershed, for the rare skipper butterfly only found there, for life, and especially for the very-much-living builder nation descendants and other nations who traded there pre-invasion.

We won. South Dakota State Game, Fish, and Parks officials hearing the final testimony in the case were in tears when they were brought to understanding. They acted immediately, without hesitation. Taken to truth and powerful within it, they acted. Though it has taken years, and tenacity by the department and surrounding community, the site is now protected, and the builder nations are returning to advise and re-engage with the traditional sacred site on the river there (now preserved as Good Earth State Park), also within the watershed of the Missouri and, I must note, downstream from Standing Rock.

Who knows what madness would have occurred if DAPL, Keystone, or any other resource mongerer would have done to me, to my students (or how they may have bought off, or infiltrated the state and surrounding community), if they had eyes on whatever is left to syphon from the earth in this climate calamity we find ourselves immersed within.

Had I listened to my own peers (who were already grandparents as well then), I would have not held the hope and cherished the power of truth within me to speak authoritatively to the significance of the place and all its many people and creatures dependent upon its preservation. I would have walked away and been disgruntled, and that would have been that.

Though lifelong and historical stress, abuse, trauma, and unending disappointment would have excused me, my inaction would have been criminal as well. Because I have that youthful heart and was capable of making a difference and needed to for all the younger generation coming, for the people coming, for my grandchildren, my students, and all the creatures still living there. And, truly, for my own elders, and those before me who gave what they could when they were young enough to do so, and for those elders who are now joining the youth, supporting the youth-led movement to protect the water from this pipeline, a pipeline only proposed to run through here after mostly white communities refused it near where they live away from the waters.

Shame on the media for the virtual blackout. When media outlets like CNN and The Washington Times do cover the DAPL onslaught, rather than taking this rich opportunity to learn and to report with integrity, they instead look for a sensational and divisional angle to publicly employ divide-and-conquer tactics on the small and vulnerable community at Standing Rock.

Both outlets ignored the many elders from whom the youth have sought advice and the many other elders who stand with them and by them; instead focusing on a few older people they could use to make their public, agenda-based points with. It is shameful to make a spectacle of older people willing to be disgruntled with the youth and supportive of incoming area foreigners. Older people who can, at times, be misled, be more complacent when put upon, obviously because of never-ending decades of putting up with what appears to be inevitable oppression experienced in this and in all Indigenous communities of Turtle Island, now dubbed the United States, in all its remarkably genocidal history.

The seventh generation is here. They are protecting all of us. It’s time that we listen.

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Resources

Rezpect Our Water

Red Warrior Camp

Camp of the Sacred Stones

Standing Rock Tribe

Guest blog: Reading Tour by Tracey Zeeck

Last weekend Tracey Zeeck, author of the about-to-be-officially released The Not In Here Story, traveled to Colorado to read from her book in bookstores and schools. The OFFICIAL release reading & signing is two days away! Sunday, Nov. 6, 2pm at Full Circle Books in Oklahoma City. 

Tracey wrote about her recent whirlwind tour below. Enjoy!  

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Tracey reads at The Bookworm book store in Edwards, CO

What a weekend! My first promoting my book, The Not in Here Story!

Last week my husband, son, and I left Oklahoma City for Colorado on Thursday afternoon, landing in Denver around 7 p.m. After letting our son eat a healthy meal of airport fast food hamburgers, we jumped in our rental SUV and headed out on I-70. Charlie passed out immediately, still adorned with his paper crown from dinner, and slept the entire way up. We arrived in Edwards, just west of Vail, around 9:10 p.m., to discover that all the restaurants closed about 10 minutes before we got in. Luckily the grocery store was open late, and after scavenging a pretty decadent menu we sat in our room and feasted on ice cream and salami and popcorn and pecans before hitting the sack.

My first reading was at The Bookworm on Friday at 9:15. I had never heard of this place, but Penny Candy Books set it up and I am so glad they did! The Bookworm is a darling little bookstore on the town square with a sweet-as-can-be staff and a robust children's book section.

Now toddler story time is always...entertaining. And this was no exception. Wiggly little kids really crack me up, and even with all of their kinetic listening, they still remained engaged through the whole story. (Whew!) I read a handful of other, mostly Halloween-related, tales, too. And I even sold a book to one of the grandmothers in attendance. Hooray! We said goodbye, bought some books and gifts, and hit the road.

Two hours later, we arrived at Coal Creek Canyon elementary, in the hills somewhere between Golden and Boulder. Principal Livingston is a former Peace Corps volunteer, and runs a pretty peaceful student body. I was lucky to get to read to three different groups: K-2nd; 3rd & 4th graders, and the tony sophisticates of the 5th & 6th grade. What an amazing group! Every reading was meaningful and every group had its own set of questions. I hated leaving, but we had an event to attend that night. It was going to be a late night.

The next morning, I was up at dawn to sit down for an interview with CBS Denver. They have a program that helps match kids in foster care with adoptive families for forever homes. (So if you're looking for a reason to support network TV, there you go!) They were so engaged with the book that they didn't even notice how I got ready for the interview in a Starbucks bathroom! The rest of the day was spent hanging out with friends and stealing chocolate from their kids' Halloween stash.

The crowd in the courtyard of Second Star to the Right Books in Denver. 

Saturday night, we checked ourselves into the hotel, ordered room service, and caught up on some sleep in preparation for the big event the next day. My Sunday reading and signing was at a store called Second Star to the Right Books.

Man. This place. I read my book to a full house, outdoors, beneath a tent with quilts and cushions on the ground. I had family and friends come to this precious place from as far as Trinidad and Boulder, and I will remember that forever. My 87-year-old aunt was among them. And, not too shabby, we sold out the store's entire stock of The Not In Here Story! Then I hugged, said goodbyes, hugged some more, and we made it to the airport in time to catch our flight.

My husband and son and were with me every step of the way. We were a team. We are a team. 

That's family.

What a week: road trip notes & glowing reviews!

What a whirlwind week road tripping with our indefatigable author, Quraysh Ali Lansana and his book, A Gift from Greensboro. Long drives, teaching sessions, presentations, unscheduled appearances, small crowds, big crowds—the man doesn't stop! It was so fun to watch Quraysh in his element, talking to young people—from kindergartners to high school students—about the impacts of the Civil Rights Movement as well as the journey still ahead of us.

We did a lot of driving through the South: Richmond to Farmville, VA to Greensboro, NC to Raleigh. In each city, we learned another unique piece of Civil Rights history, from Farmville's 5-year shut down of public schools to avoid integration and the Black students who initiated boycotts of substandard replacement schools (we met one of them!) to a day-by-day timeline of the sit-ins in Greensboro led by 4 college students who'd had enough. The Greensboro sit-ins weren't the first of their kind, but they were the catalyst for the Movement that swept the South and resulted in lunch counter integration. 

Speaking of lunch counters, we saw the original counter in the International Civil Rights Museum, which used to be the Woolworth store featured so amazingly by Skip Hill in A Gift from Greensboro. The energy of disruption and victory hovers in that room. 

This trip, more than a publicity or book sale opportunity, was simply an honor to be a part of. We're not just making books. We might just be creating community too. 

Quraysh at the Greensboro International Civil Rights Museum discussing the book with students and parents. 

Quraysh at the Virginia Children's Book Festival with a group of high school creative writers (and Chad taking a photo from the other direction).

http://whoorl.com/2016/10/penny-candy-books/

Finally, we woke up this morning after lots of driving and flying, and we discovered this unbelievable post about Penny Candy Books on Sarah James's Whoorl. If you get a chance, give it a read! So great to see that readers—kids and grown ups alike—are digging our mission and our books!!

Tour Dates & Thanks

Wednesday marks the first day of our first book tour at Penny Candy Books. We have an exciting week planned to promote A Gift from Greensboro with author Quraysh Ali Lansana. 

Wednesday, Oct 12, 10:30 a.m. -- Reading at the Black Male Emergent Readers program at the Hull Street branch of the Richmond Public Library

Thursday, Oct 13, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. -- PCB has a booth at the Virginia Children's Book Festival at Longwood University in Farmville, VA

Friday, Oct 14, 9:00 a.m. to 1 p.m. -- Booth at the Virginia Children's Book Festival 

Friday, Oct 14, 3:30 p.m. -- "Civil Rights in Children's Literature" panel (Mr. Lansana is a panelist), Moton Museum, Farmville, VA

Saturday, Oct 15, 11:00 a.m. -- Reading at the International Civil Rights Center & Museum, Greensboro, NC

Saturday, Oct 15, 5:00 p.m. -- Reading at So & So Books, downtown Raleigh, NC

It's going to be a whirlwind of a trip, with the emotional high point being the reading at the International Civil Rights Center & Museum in Greensboro. This is the actual Woolworth's Department store where the "Greensboro Four"--David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, Jr., and Joseph McNeil--held their sit-ins in 1960. This is the setting for A Gift from Greensboro, and so it's a real thrill and honor to be able to stage a reading there, in the same room where the sit-ins took place. 

It's been a long road to get Penny Candy Books to this point, and yet it feels like the real journey is just beginning. We'd like to thank, in no particular order: Shanna Compton of Bloof Books, our brilliant book designer; Britt and Jeff at Print Ninja, for all things printing; Doug Sorocco and Emily Campbell, our attorneys at Dunlap Codding; Emily Pomeroy, for her invaluable legal assistance in the early days of PCB; Mark Jung and Judy Ogren, our distributors at Itasca Books; Sache Primeaux-Shaw and Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, our first two members of our Advisory Council, for agreeing to give us their wisdom; Melodie Garneau, our landlord at Paramount OKC; Clay Collum, our accountant at Robison Gary Johnson; Amanda O'Connor, for the book industry tutorials; Zach Powers, for a fabulous video; Emily and Aaron for their patience and understanding; Gus and Emmett for their excellent focus group work; Pikey and Calvin for the snuggles; Lee and Jana Reynolds and Rita Orgera for their support and help; Timothy Bradford at Short Order Poems for the encouragement; Amy Young at SixTwelve for the encouragement; and We Need Diverse Books and Lee & Low for the inspiration to found a press focused on diversity. 

Of course we'd like to thank our incredible authors and illustrators--Quraysh Ali Lansana, Skip Hill, Tracey Zeeck, David Bizzaro, Tiffany McKnight, and Margaux Othats--for entrusting us with their work and for the inspiration. We'd like to thank the authors and illustrators we'll be working with in 2017--we have lots of big announcements coming soon! And we'd like to thank people like you who want to buy our books!

Skip Hill discusses his favorite passage!

You've seen a snippet from A GIFT FROM GREENSBORO author, Quraysh Ali Lansana. Now take a look at some video from illustrator, Skip Hill as he discusses his favorite passage.

If you're in Oklahoma City check this out from Sept 29 - Oct 22:

This Thursday! Skip Hill, illustrator of the forthcoming kids' book A Gift from Greensboro, which has been praised by Newbery Medal and National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson as "an elegant, important story—lovingly and beautifully told," will be opening an exhibit of his illustrations for AGFG at Artspace at Untitled in downtown OKC. The exhibit will run through October 22. The book's release date is Oct. 8, and on Oct 20 there will be a panel discussion at the gallery with the illustrator Skip Hill, the author Quraysh Ali Lansana, and the publisher Penny Candy Books (represented by Chad Reynolds). Stop by Thursday for a sneak peek at Skip's art for the book, as well as the finished book itself.

Books Before Bandaids Reviews A Gift from Greensboro

Take a look at this great review we just got from blogger Sarah at Books Before Bandaids! Click here for full review.

Here's an excerpt:

 

"These layered images, allow for many conversations about Civil Rights and current events. Throughout the passionate book doves fly from page to page, bringing the idea of peace and hope full circle. This is a moving book that I would recommend to anyone, a must read in light of current events. Lansana and Hill bring history alive and make it modern and real for readers struggling to understand the what and the why of current events."

Quraysh Ali Lansana Reads A Gift from Greensboro