Reading Is Fundamental Takes Its Mission Into the 21st Century
Established in 1966, Washington, D.C.-based Reading Is Fundamental is the nation’s oldest and largest children’s literacy organization. In May, it capped its 35th anniversary with a "National Reading Celebration," which featured special events at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington during RIF’s annual Reading Is Fun Week, which ran from May 5-12.
Sarah Zacks, owner and founder of Books on the Square in Providence, Rhode Island, remembers the difficulty of toting one or more of her five children to downtown stores with few parking spaces and child-unfriendly sales people. That’s why, when she opened her bookstore 10 years ago, she selected a spot with good parking that was six blocks from the crowded Brown University area and away from the congested downtown.
Chances are that by now you have heard of Jonathan Safran Foer or his first novel, Everything Is Illuminated (Houghton Mifflin). You may have heard that he wrote this acclaimed, complex novel while still an undergraduate at Princeton, or that the book grew out of a creative writing thesis project advised by Joyce Carol Oates and Jeffrey Eugenides.
The Southeast Booksellers Association (SEBA) recently announced the winners of the SEBA Book Awards. The winners of the 2002 awards will be honored at the "Rep Appreciation, Book Awards, and More Celebration" at Books & Books in Coral Gables, Florida on Thursday, September 19. The Awards are given to recognize the year's best books either by a Southern author or set in the South.
On April 25, Wyoming's Teton County Board of Education (TCBE) voted 4-2 to ban Julius Lester’s When Dad Killed Mom (Silver Whistle) from the Jackson Hole Middle School (JHMS) library. However, after much attention from local media and the book’s author, district policy is being "reviewed and re-written so that incidents like this will not happen again," Board member Zia Yasrobie told BTW via e-mail. 
I was at the Phoenix airport, just in from L.A., and facing the prospect of having to read in a town where I knew, basically, no one.