Our curated list, assembled with the help of local authors and booksellers, includes anticipated tomes from big names, including the pope.

Jo Salazar’s debut horror masterpiece If We Survive the Night begins in the Pegasus Center, a residential facility where sixteen-year-old Quinn and other young women are being treated for various m…

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After interviewing dozens of candidates for English teaching positions, I developed some approaches and questions for seeing the best in each candidate. I’m mostly interested in figuring out if the…

Cynthia Leitich Smith’s Here Come the Aunties! (Heartdrum / HarperCollins) is a warm, delightful picture book celebrating Indigenous heritage as expressed through the ubiquitous presence of Aunties…

A goal for my soul is to see live music at least once a month. 2025 provided so many great experiences and moments, and I’d like to share a few highlights here.   Did I see The Beatles?&n…

Now THAT was a World Series! World?  Yes!  The season that began in Japan ended in Canada.  The players involved were born in nine different countries on three continents.  The …

Jen Vincent is one of the best writing teachers ever, so her new book Living the Life of a Writer:  6 Practices Students Writers Have, Know, and Do (Routledge, 2026) is  cause for celebration.  And…

In Idris Goodwin’s forthcoming young adult verse novel King of the Neuro Verse, it’s 1999 and Pernell is in summer school, again. His English teacher, Ms. Harding, dismisses his attention deficit d…

Bruce Janu admits nuclear proliferation wasn’t on his mind on graduation day 1986 at John Hersey High School, when the Arlington Heights school’s namesake returned for a final time to speak at com...

A student journalist for Prospect High School’s newspaper uncovered former Principal Alvin Kulieke’s ties to a fringe religious group and its early embrace of eugenics principles. Now Northwest Su...

On the Bright Side is Anna Sortino’s brilliant 2024 young-adult, dual-narrative novel that opens with Elle’s junior year ending as her fully immersive Deaf boarding school closes due to budget cuts…

The narrator of Weshoyot Alvitre’s picture book Brave (Kokila, 2025) is a young Native boy wrestling with the importance of his long, braided hair. During his mother’s uncomfortable daily unknottin…

According to legislators, 90 schools throughout the state use these references and will be required make the switch.

In Sons of Baseball: Growing Up with a Major League Dad, author Mark Braff recounts the careers of eighteen major leaguers, followed by interviews focused on what it was like to be the son of a profes...

”For starters, your soul will get bigger. / Your love, more terrible and luminous.” – from “Why Read Poetry If It Won’t Make You Rich?” (71) Joy Sullivan’s debut poetry collection Instructions for Tr...

Love & Saffron isn’t the kind of novel I usually choose, but one of our local librarians made it sound so enticing in an online post that I took a chance on the audio version. The book is letters from...

This tribute to Venice written by the self-described Venetophile Judith Martin explores Venetian history and culture past and present; Venetian representations in film, art,and literature; the city’s ...

Mariann Edgar Budde is the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, perhaps best known for challenging President Donald Trump when he posed with a Bible (held upside down) in front of St. John’s Church after i...

Liz Deacle is a Londoner transplanted to New Zealand who traveled around the world with her husband and two teenage children and blogged about it. Her blog then morphed into her first book, The Travel...

In honor of International Women’s Day and all of the extraordinary women in my life, here is my poem “Sister,” originally published in Moon Journal. Sister Not having had a sister…

Photo: Levine Querido Chooch is two years old, and he likes to help. The help of a two-year old isn’t usually all that helpful, but everyone gives him grace except Sissy, his older sister who has n…

This year, the committee recognized twelve outstanding books of poetry and nine novels in verse as 2025 Notable Books. These selections emphasize inclusiveness and diversity, showcasing a wide range o...