What Makes A Great Picture Book? A Conversation with Betsy Bird

Summary

Betsy Bird is the Collection Development Manager of Evanston Public Library and the former Youth Materials Specialist of New York Public Library. She writes for the School Library Journal blog A Fuse #8 Production and reviews for Kirkus. She is the host of the Story Seeds podcast as well as the co-host of the Fuse 8 n' Kate podcast that she creates with her sister. Betsy is the author of nonfiction, picture books, anthologies, and the historical middle grade novel Long Road to the Circus (Knopf, 2021), illustrated by David Small. Her new picture book Pop Goes the Nursery Rhyme is out Fall 2024. You can follow Betsy @fusenumber8 on Instagram, Threads and TikTok or @fuse8.bsky.social on BlueSky. In our animated conversation, we talk about what makes a great picture book.

Your Host

Mel Rosenberg

Mel Rosenberg is a professor emeritus of microbiology (Tel Aviv University) who fell in love with children's books as a small child in Ottawa and now writes his own. He is co-founder of Ourboox, a web platform with over 260,000 ebooks that allows anyone to create and share flipbooks comprising text, pictures and videos.

He is represented by the Liza Royce Agency.
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