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Aaron Reynolds, After the Fall, Beekle, Bloomsbury, Brown Books, Caldecott Medal, Creepy Carrots, Dan Santat, Dude, illustrator, interview, Little, macmillan, Neal Porter Book, picture book, Roaring Brook Press, Scholastic, writer
In April, I had the pleasure of watching funny men AARON REYNOLDS and DAN SANTAT dazzle elementary school kids by acting out their new one-word picture book, Dude! Afterward, they graciously shared their wisdom and expertise.
CHRISTINE VAN ZANDT: What advice do you have for prepublished writers and illustrators?
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Every year, SCBWI Los Angeles opens our Writers Day contest to all members attending the event. This year, our anonymous judges chose 10 honorees in Young Adult, Middle Grade, Picture Book, and Other (which includes poetry and non-fiction). First place winners in each category receive free tuition to next year’s Writers Day, as well as a manuscript critique from one of this year’s faculty members. There were a lot of wonderful entries and a “20% of total entries” guideline was used to determine how many manuscripts were honored in each category. As Contest Coordinator Karol Ruth Silverstein so aptly put it, “Regardless of whether you win or lose, putting your work out there to be judged by entering the contest is a courageous act in itself. So let me first congratulate all of you who entered.”
SCBWI member Anne Berry is an illustrator living and working in Huntington Beach, California. She’s been doodling ever since she found paper and pencil, and could get her cats to sit long enough for a portrait. At the 2015 SCBWI Summer Conference, she won the SCBWI Mentorship Program award and the Portfolio Honor Award. Read on for her valuable tips about perfecting your own portfolio and to check out her awesome illustrations!
A Charmed Life / Una Vida con Suerte, by Gladys E. Barbieri, illustrated by Lisa Fields, Arte Público Press, ages 4-8, bilingual picture book, ISBN: 978-1-55885-827-5, released 05/30/2016.
We love our volunteers at SCBWI and couldn’t exist without them! “Volunteer Spotlight” is a great way to get to know them for yourself and learn more about what they do and how you can volunteer too. Now meet Gina Capaldi, Illustrator Coordinator for the SCBWI’s Inland Empire, also known as SoCal.
How do you get 150,000 dedicated book buyers to consider your book? How do you get 50 authors and/or illustrators together to sell their work to those 150,000 eager buyers? The answer is the Los Angeles SCBWI booth at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. 
Do the words “comic book convention” sound scary to you? Overwhelming? Completely irrelevant to you as a children’s book author or illustrator? Think again. Even if your work isn’t “in genre,” you can still learn a lot. If you want to know what kids are into right now, or your creative juices need a boost, there’s no better place to go than a Con.