Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

This is a quick note today to share some of the most very excellent kidlitosphere events going on this month, most of them having to do with National Poetry Month. I mean, really, the kidlitosphere ROCKS. If it were an animal, it would be a rocknocerous. If it were a store, it’d be Rock-Mart. If it were a small village in the distant hinterlands of the British Isles somewhere, it’d be Rockingham. Its rockositude is, quite frankly, off the charts. Here’s proof:

Wait. Who is this guy? Oh yeah, okay. It’s Gregory Pincus over at GottaBook. Who up and shaved on us.

In case you missed it, Greg will be celebrating National Poetry Month in a big ol’ way with 30 Poets/30 Days. Read all about it here, including his all-star poet line-up, but bottom line is that he’ll be posting a previously unpublished poem by a different poet for each day in April. You gotta love that. Jack Prelunsky launches Greg’s event today with “A Little Poem For Poetry Month.”

The honorable Tricia Stohr-Hunt of The Miss Rumphius Effect features Poetry Makers, in which she’ll be interviewing thirty-six rock-star poets during the month of April. The schedule’s here. How fabulous is that? Very, I say.

The multi-faceted Farida Dowler of Saints and Spinners and Minh Le of bottom shelf books (whose response to the curse-word Pivot question back in August 2007 remains my all-time favorite one and which is not appropros to this post, so I apologize) are hosting—starting today!—a children’s-book-sequels contest that calls upon the abundant creativity of their readers. It is entitled, not surprisingly, Unnecessary Children’s Book Sequels That Never Were. (What? You’ve never heard of the doomed, downright DISASTROUS sequel to Wanda Gág’s Millions of Cats, the recently discovered Millions of Rats? Well, head on over to Farida’s site to read about it today.)

Let me tell you that with both Farida and Minh involved this promises to be, as my friend likes to say, a hoot and a nanny. Between April 1—10, Farida and Minh invite you to submit your book titles and 2-3 sentence synopses to the Unnecessary Children’s Book Sequels That Never Were contest. GROOVY PRIZES will be given! You can find all the information you need here at Farida’s site.

(And if you’re not already familiar with Farida’s Children’s Book That Never Were series, then there’s some laughter missing from your life. Here’s how you can go fix that. Pictured above is one of the latest titles.)

Jone MacCulloch is one of the country’s best school librarians. Yup, she is. Over at Check It Out, she’s got a fab poetry-month project, a simple yet beautiful one: She will send a postcard to you, if you email her your address, of one of her student’s poems. I’ve received one of these before, and it will brighten your day. (And just imagine how fun it must be to the students who write them.) Here is last year’s post about it. She’s doing it exactly the same this year.

Just One More Book!! — Can we please establish an annual JOMB Appreciation Day for all that they bring to us? Anyway, their latest venture is video footage of their six-day trip at the end of last year to Connecticut and Northampton, in which they stopped and chatted with children’s book authors and illustrators, what they’re calling their November 2008 Rock Stars of Reading road trip. You can read about it here, as well as see their kickin’ promotional video for it. And they kicked it all off yesterday with Part 1.

You do know, right, that Elaine Magliaro of Wild Rose Reader and the Blue Rose Girls has a new blog of political verses? It’s good stuff. She’s also celebrating National Poetry Month over there by giving away books of light verse as prizes for people who leave comments at her posts during the month of April. The post with the prizes is here! And the poems over at her new blog are FUN.

Evidently, at Poetry for Children, Sylvia Vardell will be reviewing a new children’s poetry book every day. And at Pencil Talk — School Poems, author and teacher and blogger Anastasia Suen is inviting K-12 students during the month of April to write their own poems and send them to her. She will post them there at Pencil Talk.

And heaven only knows how many other events/plans I’m missing…

And what is 7-Imp doing to celebrate National Poetry Month?

Well, I’m not half as organized as the above and very talented bloggers. But celebrations will occur in the form of some interviews/features with poets and poet/illustrators AND artists who have illustrated poetry titles, and I’ve got some new poetry collections and anthologies I’d love to share. This Sunday when we go a-kickin’, instead of featuring a student or new-to-the-field illustrator, as happens the first Sunday of each month, we’ll have sort of a mini-version of Greg’s stellar event. (I swear, we didn’t call each other — we’re just psychic, I guess.) Several poets will stop by to share some never-seen-before poems, and I’ll have some lovely Julie Paschkis art.

That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it.

{Don’t miss this post, in which author Sara Lewis Holmes talks about the call for submissions from the Academy of American Poets in their Free Verse Project. An extremely cool idea.}