“We’re expecting a lot of excitement around the upcoming NASA moon missions,” says Sam Priddy, co-publisher of Neon Squid. “There are a lot of space books out there, so we’re always looking for ways authors can take such a popular topic and spin it in different ways.”

Carol Hinz, associate publisher for Millbrook Press and Carolrhoda, offers a similar prognostication. “With a renewed focus on sending humans to the moon, I expect to see quite a number of moon- and space-related books in the coming years,” she says.

Charlesbridge’s marketing director Donna Spurlock had a bird’s-eye view of some of the growing excitement at the recent ALA Annual Convention. “Our booth was just a few doors down from NASA’s,” she explains. “They had a lot of traffic from teachers and librarians looking for astronomy curriculum and for the chance to speak with real NASA scientists and engineers. And everyone was mesmerized by the screens full of images of deep space. We even got to share a copy of Unlocking the Universe by Suzanne Slade—which is about the building of the James Webb telescope—with one of the engineers who worked on the Webb telescope.” This experience, she says, “just spoke to the fact that cutting-edge science—what we’re seeing happening in the news and in the world around us—is popular and necessary.”

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