Press

While everyone continues to shelter in place, the Abilene (TX) Cultural Affairs Council’s Sidney Levesque spoke with Leonard about the memorable 2017 city-wide CALF arts and literacy festival when the illustration art of Garth Williams was celebrated with the largest ever Williams [...]

As chair of the Eric Carle Museum’s Carle Honors Committee and as founder of the awards, Leonard takes an active role in choosing each year’s winners. The Carle awards are unique in recognizing not only the contributions of the artists who create picture books but also the work of [...]

In an essay published in the December 22, 2019 print edition of the New York Times Book Review, Leonard makes the case for re-thinking the Caldecott Medal, the world’s first award for excellence in children’s book illustration, for the very different world in which we find ourselves [...]

On November 14, the Shanghai-based Chen Bochui Foundation presented its annual awards in children’s literature–China’s oldest–at the Boashan International Folk Arts Exhibition Center, Shanghai. This year, Leonard became the first American to win the coveted award for [...]

This free public program will take a closer look at the key issues surrounding diversity in the children's books that set out most directly to propose role models for young readers.

The Kerlan Collection's adaptation of the New York Public Library's most viewed exhibition ever continues to draw a wide range of visitors from far and wide and to generate lively discussion about the books that shape us in our first years of life.

Helen Oxenbury: A Life in Illustration was a long time in the making. This conversation with Gillian Engberg highlights the challenges of crafting a true portrait of an artist whose now-classic children's books are never as simple as they seem.

The Bologna Children's Book Fair's exciting, overflow crowd program "Black Books Matter" opened up a vigorous and intensely peronal discussion that attendees from many countries were clearly eager to have.

Chairing the Carle Honors Committee of the Eric Carle Museum of Museum of Picture Book Art continues to be a deeply satisfying way to help recognize the most innovative efforts of artists, publishing and library professionals, and others to connect children with books both here and around the world.

The Eric Carle Museum celebrates the graphic novel's coming of age with its first exhibition devoted to this flourishing art form, which young people everywhere have wholeheartedly embraced.

To say that interviewing Ursula Nordstrom, Harper's legendary publisher of cutting-edge book for children and teens, was a challenge would be a major understatement; more than a decade would pass before I realized that she had revealed the very essence of her editorial wizardry to me that day.

Leonard's work as editor of the Library of America's authoritative edition of Madeleine L'Engle's Kairos Novels really began, in a sense, years earlier during a memorable, touch-and-go encounter with the author of A Wrinkle in Time. Here's what happened.

This fall, Leonard joined New York Public librarian Jenny Rosenoff and illustrator Bryan Collier in selecting the year's ten best illustrated children's books of 2018. The daunting process took place over a single day in October, in a room at the Times' headquarters in which approximately 2000 [...]

Helen Oxenbury is a picture book artist in the grand English tradition of Beatrix Potter and Edward Ardizzone. Her career spans five eventful decades during which books for the youngest ages like hers finally came into their own and children’s book publishing became a global enterprise. [...]

Each morning for a week starting on October 29, Leonard gave a series of illustrated lectures at Ocean University, in Qingdao, China, chronicling the origins and history of the American picture book. Audience members included students and faculty in the university's children's literature [...]

This fall Leonard was one of five judges invited to select 100 notable picture books for display at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The project was sponsored by dPictus, a web-based rights showcase featuring contemporary books from Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

Leonard asks why some children's books are too good to be forgotten in this occasional series of conversations with authors, illustrators, and another book people;

Ursula Nordstrom, Harper’s visionary publisher of “good books for bad children,” is now the subject of a comics tribute by illustrator Joana Avillez. It appeared on the back page of the New York Times Book Review as Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom reached its [...]

     Most everyone has fallen under the magnetic spell of the American illustrator Garth Williams (1912-1996) at one time or another: as childhood readers, as parents or grandparents, or as professionals concerned with young people and their books. Charlotte’s Web? The Little House on the [...]