From New Voices New Rooms in August through the double-billed Heartland Fall Forum and Mountains and Plains FallCon in mid-October, this fall’s trade shows introduced booksellers to a wide range of children’s authors and exciting fall 2024 and spring 2025 releases. Below are snapshots from the six fall trade shows.
Booksellers Gather Up and Down the Eastern Seaboard
New Voices New Rooms, the second in-person joint show for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance and New Atlantic Booksellers Association, took place August 8–11, in Arlington, Va., across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. The conference’s first day included bookstore tours around the metro area, as well as a bookmobile rally in front of the Marriott Crystal City Gateway hotel. It ended with an Early Bird Reception that included two YA authors: Lisa Roberts Carter, author of If You Knew My Name (Central Avenue) and Sarah Henning, author of The Lies We Conjure (Tor Teen). Henning also made her way to the Mountains and Plains trade show.
NVNR’s breakfast keynote presentation the next morning, “Centering the Book,” began with poet and performance artist Tony Keith Jr. (Knucklehead, Quill Tree, Feb. 2025), who read from his debut poetry collection for YA readers, which he described as as a series of letters designed to “heal, provoke, and inspire” Black men and boys, “especially the gay and queer ones.” Keith then performed a selection from the book, Poetry to the Rescue, which included such lines as, “I’m just a superhero / With a cape made of metaphors / Trying to use my words / To simply save you / And yes / At some point in time / I may need a little bit of saving.”
Ellen Oh, a founder of We Need Diverse Books, and Dhonielle Clayton, WNDB’s board chair, received the 2024 Legacy Award during NVNR, bestowed by NAIBA in recognition of their efforts to champion diverse authors and their books. In accepting the award, Oh recalled that NAIBA executive director Eileen Dengler was the first to invite WNDB after its 2014 launch to participate in a regional booksellers gathering; 15 WNDB authors were featured during an authors’ reception that year.
Noting the increase in the number of diverse books being published today compared to 10 years ago, Oh pointed out that book banners target books with BIPOC protagonists or themes, as well as books with LGBTQ protagonists or themes. “They will not win,” Oh assured booksellers, “as long as we stand firm together in the knowledge of just how important diverse books are for all of our children."
A month later, from September 11 to 14, the New England Independent Booksellers Association gathered in Newton, Mass., with many children’s authors and illustrators in attendance. A children’s editors’ luncheon featured a lineup of industry professionals, including David Levithan, editorial director at Scholastic Press; Annette Pollert-Morgan, editorial director of Sourcebooks Fire; Margaret Raymo, executive editor at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers; Ariel Richardson, senior editor at Chronicle Books; Rūta Rimas, senior executive editor and publishing director at Penguin Young Readers; and Jeffrey Friedman, editor in chief of independent Rogue Bear Press.
A NEIBA highlight was the announcement of the annual Windows & Mirrors book list, selected by the New England Children’s Booksellers Association. On September 13, NECBA co-chairs Kinsey Foreman of High Five Books and Sara Waltuck of the Brookline Booksmith joined Windows & Mirrors committee co-chairs Kimi Loughlin of Silver Unicorn Books and Alyssa Raymond of Copper Dog Books to announce the 2024 short- and longlists.
Foreman, who has been involved in choosing the Windows & Mirrors titles since 2020, told PW there were many worthy contenders for the diverse books list. "This year in particular we felt like it was really important to highlight Palestinian voices," Foreman said. "I think the final selections reflect that intention and we're grateful to publishers, booksellers, and the entire book community who are doing the same to highlight Palestinian voices and stories in their parts of the industry." Foreman also saw an increase in graphic novels with Windows & Mirrors themes, particularly in YA. As for other categories, "we often struggle to find enough early reader submissions," she said. "We're on the lookout for titles for emerging readers, especially featuring LGBTQIA+ kids and families!"
West Coast Booksellers Meet Authors
Hard on the heels of NEIBA, the California Independent Booksellers Alliance met in Pasadena September 17–18, with sessions on picture book nonfiction, YA romance, and new releases in horror that included Alex Brown’s Rest in Peaches (Page Street YA) and Justine Pucella Winans’s Wishbone (Bloomsbury).
CALIBA’s new executive director, Hannah Walcher, moderated a talk with authors Patrick Ness, Matt de la Peña, Pam Muñoz Ryan, and David Shannon. Ness said he created his middle grade Chronicles of a Lizard Nobody, illustrated by Tim Miller (Walker Books US), by combining an offhand joke about “hall monitor lizards” with “direct inspiration from Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing” by Judy Blume.
Shannon—whose next stop was the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association meeting—told listeners about his forthcoming picture book That’s Not Funny, David! (Orchard, Mar. 2025), 25 years after the original No, David! “It was fun having David back in my studio again,” Shannon said, noting that he hadn’t painted with acrylics since his previous David book, seven years ago.
Muñoz Ryan, who’d also been at NEIBA, spoke about her new middle grade novel, El Niño (Scholastic, May 2025), illustrated by Joe Cepeda and set in her home state of California. El Niño is about a young swimmer and surfer who is mourning his sister; Muñoz Ryan said the characters came to her during a pandemic-era video call, when she wishfully offered to help a friend shoulder an ongoing sadness. “If only it were that easy” to help carry someone’s sorrow, she recalled, and she began exploring grief in her fiction.
De la Peña talked about the difficulty of finding a narrative arc for his picture book, Home, illustrated by Loren Long (Putnam, Mar. 2025), an exploration of “home” as a concept and a follow-up to Love. He wanted to write about “how a child goes from seeing home as a physical structure” or location to thinking of it as an idea, or an ideal. “I think I write YA picture books,” de la Peña concluded.
In Portland, Ore., from September 29 to October 1, PNBA welcomed national stars and regional successes. More than half of the 20 authors at an evening reception were kids’ creators, including graphic novel creators Joanna Cacao, illustrator of Christina Soontornvat’s second cheerleading book, The Squad (Scholastic, Nov.); and Tori Sharp, author-illustrator of the middle-grade podcasting story Stand Up! (Little, Brown Ink). Cacao had a busy fall schedule, visiting not only PNBA but also Heartland and MPIBA, while Soontornvat also attended NEIBA.
PNBA also gave kids’ creators the spotlight at a midafternoon session with Lynn Brunelle, who spoke about life cycles and decomposition in her STEM picture book Life After Whale, illustrated by Jason Chin (Holiday House/Porter); Natalie Lloyd, who reflected on disability and able-bodiedness in her fantasy narratives, including The Witching Wind (Scholastic Press); Emily Lloyd-Jones, who adapted Welsh mythology for The Wild Huntress (Little, Brown); and Portland trans author Aiden Thomas, whose queer fantasy Celestial Monsters (Feiwel and Friends) follows the characters of The Sunbearer Trials.
At a PNBA keynote breakfast, Brian Selznick introduced his first-ever YA novel, Run Away with Me (Scholastic Press, Apr. 2025), about two boys who fall in love in Rome in the summer of 1986. The story opens with a wordless sequence of unpopulated streets and statuary to create “the sense that you’re remembering the city,” Selznick said, before the characters meet.
Selznick said PNBA was his first time speaking publicly about the novel, which took shape on an extended visit to the Italian capital in 2021. The pandemic had shut down tourism in Rome, and a resident told him, “The strangest thing about an empty Rome is there are no people kissing on the street.” That observation informed his story of romance, secrecy, and “the history of joy that can go along with queer love.”
From the Mountains and Plains Through the Heartland
Selznick gave another version of his talk at the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association gathering in Denver the following week, at a Young Readers’ Fest keynote breakfast. Featured authors included Rex Ogle, who said his YA novel-in-verse about addiction, When We Ride (Norton Young Readers, Mar. 2025), grew out of lived experience, growing up as a gay kid in Abilene, Tex., and befriending a high school drug dealer. “We all contain multitudes,” Ogle said. And although the novel mostly “wrote itself, the ending caught me off guard.”
Other books at MPIBA were on the lighter side. Thyra Heder said her picture book Nose to Nose (Abrams) imagines the “community message board” of “pee graffiti” that dogs leave for one another on their walks. Science writer Jorge Cham also took a comical approach to his latest Oliver’s Great Big Universe title, Volcanoes Are Hot! (Amulet), by asserting, “Volcanoes are how the Earth barfs,” a surefire selling point for young readers.
Shannon Hale and Dean Hale stopped at both PNBA and MPIBA for The Princess in Black and the Kitty Catastrophe, illustrated by LeUyen Pham (Candlewick), another book that imagines “a girl in her full power,” Shannon Hale said. Dean Hale added that, when charting a narrative trajectory, he and Shannon ask themselves two questions—“What’s more fun?” and “What’s unexpected?”—and write with the answers in mind. That process is working out for them, with the 11-book Princess in Black series going strong after 10 years.
Elsewhere at Mountains and Plains, Danielle Sharkan signed copies of her picture book Sharing Shalom, illustrated by Selina Alko (Holiday House), about how a girl who loves the Hebrew language and storytelling reckons with vandalism at her synagogue. Carole Lindstrom introduced a new picture book, The Gift of the Great Buffalo, illustrated by Aly McNight (Bloomsbury, Feb. 2025). And Marci Kay Monson, trade marketing manager at Gibbs Smith Education and an MPIBA volunteer, touted her own The Mysterious Affair at Styles, illustrated by Greg Paprocki. Based on an Agatha Christie detective story, it inaugurates a Gibbs Smith Mini Mysteries series, with young readers finding clues and solving puzzles on every spread.
While the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers and the Midwest Independent Booksellers Associations focused on education at this year’s Heartland Fall Forum held Oct. 6–9, there were plenty of opportunities to meet authors, especially children’s book authors. The gathering’s opening reception that featured five authors presenting their (primarily) 2025 releases included one children’s book author, Emi Watanabe Cohen (Golem Crafters, Levine Querido, Nov.). Cohen, who is Jewish and Japanese American, draws upon her mixed background and the folklore of each to weave stories for middle grade readers that are infused with magic.
Later that same day, Philip C. Stead, the recipient of this year’s Heartland Booksellers Award in the picture book category for The North Wind and the Sun (Holiday House/Porter), said one of his favorite books is Brian Wildsmith’s 1964 retelling of the Aesop’s fable. Emphasizing how much he loves Wildsmith’s illustrations, Stead said that the presidential debates in 2016 were the impetus to create his own retelling of the argument between the Sun and the North Wind. Pointing out that he doesn’t believe that picture books should contain messages, but rather should have meaning for readers, Stead confessed that he failed in that respect with The North Wind and the Sun, although he tried his best, “even with a fable, to move past the tyranny of message, into the kinder, gentler, more open-hearted and ambiguous land of meaning.”
Heartland concluded on a Wednesday afternoon with the traditional Moveable Feast, which, this year, featured a dozen children’s book authors among 34 authors total, including Shannon Gibney, author of We Miss You George Floyd, illustrated by Leeya Rose Jackson (University of Minnesota Press, Nov.), and Keenan Jones, debut author of Saturday Morning at the ’Shop, illustrated by Ken Daley (S&S/Beach Lane, Jan. 2025).
Both picture books were inspired by George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Jones recalled that a South Minneapolis barbershop he frequented was torched during the week of violence that followed the killing: “I had wanted to write a book in which African American men and boys are shown in a positive light, and the barbershop being burned down made me realize how important, even sacred that space is,” Jones said. “The barbershop is such a safe place, a community hub filled with love for folks in the neighborhood.”
As for Gibney, her daughter was a first grader at a school near George Floyd Square at the time, and the child’s reaction to the murder inspired this tale about a Black girl “who finds solace and a sense of community at George Floyd Square that helps her work through in a positive way all of the feelings she has.” Noting that she and her daughter took a walk through the square with Jackson before Jackson started work on the book, Gibney praised the University of Minnesota Press. “They were definitely the right publisher for this book,” she said. “They found Jackson—a young Black woman who lives in Minneapolis—to illustrate this book; it’s the first book she’s ever illustrated and she did a spectacular job.”
