Book Festival Finds

This year’s Twin Cities Book Festival was about discovery.  A few links and thoughts for your pleasure:

• Hazel & Wren is a new online writing workshop.  You can submit your work, critique others’ work, and build a community of writers.  Sounds great to me!  Plus they had cool bookmarks.

photograph from hazelandwren.com

• Lost with a Map is a small letter press book by Marvel Gregoire.  It contains poetry and images along with embroidery.  It was quiet and lovely.

• I hadn’t realized that Kevin and Zander Cannon, illustrators of Evolution (which I’ll be blogging about more fully very soon) and cartoonists behind Big Time Attic, were local.  They also had a children’s picture book about pond hockey on display that looked cute.

• Speaking of kids’ stuff,  the highlight of the Children’s Pavilion was The Bazillions.  If you have kids, do yourself a favor and add this album to their music collection.  They sing about things kids are thinking about like careers and rocket bikes. This one is for the parents who want to move beyond The Wheels on the Bus and the classics and on to the kind of songs that let their kids know that music is relevant to their lives too.  Their album, Rock-n-Roll Recess, is available for download via Amazon.

• Other highlights included Bruce the Bug Guy with giant cockroaches and Phyllis Root reading One Duck Stuck to a group of families joining in on the “We can! We Can!” call and response.

Another great event (here’s my post about last year’s Book Fest).  I’m looking forward to next year!