First, the “business” end: we absolutely accept offers of review copies. Melissa and Sarah receive many many galleys because they are booksellers. None of the other staff receives galleys yet except when Melissa mails them some. We do not guarantee you a review on the site, but will always offer comments privately after completion. We are happy to consider galleys from any publisher, including publishers of graphic novels as more than one of us are very interested in those. Two of our staff members live in Canada and will absolutely accept galleys from Canadian publishers – please email kidliterate at gmail dot com for the correct mailing addresses.
STAFF:
MELISSA is the founder of Kidliterate and lives in St. Louis with her husband Greg (who will do guest posts occasionally) and three year old daughter Molly. She is the children’s and YA buyer and event planner for Pudd’nHead Books, a full service independent in St. Louis that opened in October 2009. She grew up in South Jersey and recently lived in the western Philadelphia suburbs, and longs for soft pretzels, her family, Broadway, and Mack and Manco’s pizza. In the Philly ‘burbs she worked at a fabulous independent children’s bookstore and misses it (and her CBW family) a lot. In previous lives she worked for many, many nonprofits, mostly in arts marketing; managed a traveling show choir; and directed a lot of children’s theatre. She plans to start a master’s program in library science eventually. In her heart, she is really a 15 year old girl. Melissa is active on Twitter under her own account (mposten) and Pudd’nHead’s (puddnheadbooks).
ELIZA is a part-time library science grad student and former high school English teacher who met Melissa online circa 2000. They bonded over their mutual love of musical theater and children’s/YA literature. Eliza’s favorite authors, lifelong and more recently, include (but are of course not limited to) Madeleine L’Engle, Shannon Hale, Paula Danziger, Lois Lowry, Marcus Zusak, Sherman Alexie, Steve Kluger, Virginia Euwer Wolff, and Ellen Emerson White. She finds it impossible to keep quiet about books she loves and is happy to have a place to shout from the rooftops about them.
KYMM ZUCKERT is an actor and director in New York who has been writing online since 1996. She has been a children’s book fan since she was an actual child, and is really thrilled for the opportunity to discover new books and then tell you how awesome they are. You know, or not.
SARAH grew up in a house filled with books, and at the age of 14 started working at the library checking books out and putting books away. She went on to get a BA in English (but not before spending a semester at Oxford, where she bought enough books to fill a suitcase) and then started her career in—drum roll please—bookselling. For the past seven years, she has spent her days at Children’s Book World in Haverford, PA, where she and Melissa first met. They became fast friends over a mutual love of Aaron Sorkin, Tazo chai, Harry Potter, pop culture, and of course, children’s books, among other things. Sarah has an uncanny ability to remember the plots of things she reads, which comes in very handy in her profession. Unfortunately she can’t remember half the things she says, which occasionally gets her into trouble. Though she tries to show love to all the genres, fantasy and science fiction tend to be her favorites. She loves reading books by first time authors, because one day she hopes to become one herself.
SARAHJANET lives in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada with her husband and a very large number of books. She has a degree in English and focused on children’s literature in university. Of all the jobs she’s had in her life, only two of them haven’t been related to books in some way, and she currently works for the public library in Edmonton where she does a lot of children’s programming and as much as possible with children’s books. She also belongs to a young adult book group with a bunch of women who are much smarter than she is, and many of her book choices come from there. She is what some might call obsessive about Harry Potter, a lifelong fan of Canadian children’s book authors Jean Little and Kit Pearson, and her favourite young adult book of all time is Feeling Sorry for Celia. She is usually either reading, knitting, or reading websites about reading or knitting, and has aspirations of being a novelist one day. She is thrilled to have a place to rave about the books she loves with other people who get excited about such things, as her husband is getting tired of being woken up when she reads a particularly good book.
