Image from Marmaduke Duck and Bernadette Bear, illustrated by Sarah Davis, published by Scholastic

Sharjah Children's Reading Festival, 2019

In 2019, author-illustrator Ruth Paul and I were invited to present at the Sharjah Children's Reading Festival in the United Arab Emirates. This is a ten-day festival attracting over 300,000 visitors. Incredibly, it was an all-expenses-paid, business-class-flights affair, with a six-night stay at the Hilton! Here's what we did:
I visited the largest school by far that I have ever been to - they had over 5000 students!
No expense spared on the exhibits!
              
We met a bunch of fun and most illustrious authors - including two-time Caldecott Medal winner, Carole Boston Weatherford!
Street markets...
heat....
and sand dunes!
We managed to get into the Gulf Today, a nationwide newspaper!
          Exquisite sand art
A caravan of camels from the Great Sand Dunes!

In other international news, Politics and Prose, a bookstore in Washington, recently reviewed The Grizzled Grist Does Not Exist. This is where Barrack Obama sometimes shops. 

I also had some great reviews for Yak and Gnu a while back in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe. Here are two of them.
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The New York Times:

And The Wall Street Journal:

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​It’s a lovely feeling, when you’re young, to share a secret name or a private song with your best friend. That’s definitely the sentiment held by two boon companions in Juliette MacIver’s “Yak and Gnu” (Candlewick, 32 pages, $14.99), a comical rhyming picture book that celebrates the bonds of special friendship even as it registers the comeuppance that friends may feel when their treasured intimacy proves to be less exceptional than they thought.
 
One sunny day, Yak sets off in his kayak, and Gnu jumps into her canoe, singing together their own goofy anthem: “Yippee-ai, Yak!” / “Woo-hoo, Gnu!” / “There’s nobody else like me and you. / No one else but you and me / can float a boat or sail the sea.” In Cat Chapman’s droll ink-and-watercolor illustrations, we see pretty quickly that there are actually lots of other creatures that resemble the two friends in these important respects.
 
Along comes a goat in a boat, and a calf on a raft, and “a rat and her clan on a catamaran,” with the best friends all the while sturdily maintaining their own singularity. Yet when the pair encounters not only a flotilla of gorillas and giraffes on hovercrafts but also an “ocean cruise full of yaks and gnus,” they are forced to admit defeat. Their song is wrong! But, really, does it matter? Of course it doesn’t in this jolly singsong read-aloud for 3- to 7-year-olds.