Posted in Shaping the World, 40 Historical Heroes in Verse

Come the Launch of Shaping the World!

Are you a teacher? Do you have a class you’d like to introduce to female and male historical heroes – via shape poems?

Are you free at 9:30 am on the 22nd of April?

Are you a shape poem fan?

If so. come and find out how penicillin was discovered (by being messy!), why Shakespeare is so loved, who invented the first sliced loaf of bread, or the system known as the Socratic method still used to solve crime today, and hear why Rosa Parks refused to leave her seat on that bus!

There are 20 female and 20 male heroes in the book, and many of the poems will be read by their authors – me, Matt Goodfellow, Roger Stevens, John Dougherty, Sue Hardy-Dawson, Jan Dean, Cheryl Moskowitz, Chitra Soundar, Dom Conlon, Shauna Darling Robertson, Kate Wakeling, Laura Mucha, Myles McLeod, Suzy Levinson, and Penny Kent – all hosted by Gaby Morgan, Editorial Director at Macmillan Children’s Books

At the same time as the readings, you will also see the wonderful shape poems themselves!

Opportunities to ask the poets questions included, FREE!

In fact the whole event is free, get your tickets here:

Posted in Shaping the World, 40 Historical Heroes in Verse

Shaping the World – Out Today!

Yes, today is the day this book arrives in the shops!

I can’t thank the poets who sent poems and shapes and ideas for shapes enough – or Gaby Morgan at Macmillan who is always so brilliantly helpful.

I’m really pleased with the resulting book – it has a fabulous, shiny cover, and 40 hero poems inside, twenty women and twenty men who helped shape the world, in a variety of voices and all the poems are shaped to represent the people, an aspect of their lives or life’s work.

Here’s an example from the book – Penny Kent’s fabulous poem about Ravi Shankar. Each poem has a mini-biography alongside the shape:

Shaping the World is available at all good bookstores of course!

Posted in Books for Christmas!

Amazing Animal Shape Poems Book!

Are you wondering about Christmas presents?

Do you buy books from Amazon? Something wonderful has happened for authors during lockdown. Well, it’s not all good. Children’s authors can no longer visit schools, and a large part, the major part of their small-anyway-income is gone. The other part is books sales – but you may be surprised to learn that authors earn very little from their books’ sales. Pennies. And sometimes book sales earn them nothing, because they were given a (very) modest advance and the books do not make as much as the advance and so the author never receives Royalties.

But now a new online bookshop has opened – one that not only gives a portion of the cover price to independent bookshops, but if an author signs up, a proportion of the sale to the author. This could be life-changing in that we might get to eat this Christmas. AND the books are discounted!

What could be better? Buying a brilliant book for a loved one, safe in the knowledge none of the money went to Amazon, and some of the money went to the person who spent 6 months night and day making shapes from poems for it…

If you buy it through this link, that is! Buy Apes to Zebras here!

Here are samples from the book:

Posted in A to Z Challenge 2019

#AtoZ Challenge; J is for James Carter

James Carter is an award-winning children’s poet, non-fiction and educational writer and INSET provider. He is the author of over 16 popular and best-selling poetry titles. James travels all over the UK and abroad with his guitar (that’s Keith) and melodica (that’s Steve) to give very lively poetry/music performances and workshops. His latest poetry/non-fiction picture book, Once Upon A Star (Little Tiger Press) was BooksforKeeps’ Book of the Week March 2018. His new book, Spaced Out, an anthology of space poems, edited with Brian Moses, is just out on May 9th! James’ website is here.

Here is the great shape poem James sent:

© James Carter

 

If you would like to blog hop to the next AtoZ Challenge, follow this link.

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