Description
Through her collection of essays about family, reading, and bonding through books, children’s literature educator and children’s book author Megan Dowd Lambert invites readers to consider how they bond with children, other family, friends, and students through shared reading. With themes including parenting, adoption, race, and healing, this 21-essay collection with its joyous and colorful illustrations is a perfect gift for parents, grandparents, librarians, educators, and anyone who spends time with children or reading together with others.
Megan Dowd Lambert earned her BA at Smith College and her MA in Children’s Literature at Simmons University, where she taught in some capacity for more than a decade. In 2009 she was named a Literacy Champion by Mass Literacy, and she served on the 2009 Geisel, 2011 Caldecott, and the 2012 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award committees. Lambert reviews and writes for Kirkus and the Horn Book, is a consultant with EmbraceRace: A Community about Race and Kids, and served as an inaugural member of the OurShelves curation team. The recipient of a 2016 Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Honor for her first picture book, A Crow of His Own, illustrated by David Hyde Costello, Lambert’s other children’s books have been recognized by: the 2017 and 2022 Massachusetts Book Award Must Read lists; the 2017 Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People list; and the 2022 NYPL Best Books for Kids list. Her books for adults include Reading Picture Books with Children: How to Shake Up Storytime and Get Kids Talking About What They See, which introduces the Whole Book Approach storytime model she developed in association with the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, and Read It Again! 70 Whole Book Approach Storytime Plans to Help You Shake Up Storytime, which was published under an imprint of her private publishing company, Modern Memoirs, Inc. Lambert’s experiences as a white mother of seven children in a blended, multiracial, queer, adoptive family inform Lambert’s work in children’s literature, perhaps most notably in her most recent title, Book Bonding: Building Connections Through Family Reading, illustrated by Mia Saine, which published in April 2023.
