Oh I am totally going to steal this. THANK YOU!

👇👇👇

@aprilhenry.bsky.social is one of my favorite YA thriller authors and a great go-to for that reluctant reader you know. Can't wait to read her newest!

Tracey Baptiste is a true ambassador of young people’s literature. She lifts up others in our community, speaks truth to power, and cares deeply about book access. Support @traceybaptiste.bsky.social. Please consider buying one of her books and sharing it with a young person. www.traceybaptiste.com

Another thread.

Thread.

I see no lies here

@amlibraryassoc.bsky.social, you're up. Please do this for all categories of the Youth Media Awards starting in 2027.

I'm spending this morning getting my newsletter together! Want in? Here's the details: www.jandersoncoats.com/newsletter

This is one of the most quietly revolutionary things any city can do to improve kids' lives & outcomes. If you genuinely care about kids having access to education or safe after school spaces & activities, then fund your libraries, staff your libraries, & make every public school ID a library card.

Thread.

FIVE. Make that FIVE LIVE MICE in the last TWELVE HOURS. 😬😬😬

I'm a YA writer. I'm also a library worker who routinely recommends books to teens. Their reading tastes are incredibly diverse. Nothing wrong with wanting all kinds of stories to offer them, but the "clean vs dirty" rhetoric enables the banners and bigots and makes both my jobs harder.

Who has no thumbs and has brought three live mice into the house in the last twelve hours - THAT WE KNOW OF.

Oooo, can't wait to read! Sidebar: Victo Ngai is super amazing. Love her work!

Your periodic reminder that if I have ever signed a book for you and now you have a different name, you can DM or email me (j at jandersoncoats dot com) with a mailing address, and I will send you a free bookplate with your new name.

April might be almost over, but there’s still time to celebrate #AutismAcceptanceMonth — today and everyday! If you’re looking for books with meaningful Autism representation on the page, here are 24 newly released and upcoming books starring autistic characters for you to check out 🧵

This #NationalLibraryWeek, We Need Diverse Books is proud to announce that we’ve welcomed 21 school and classroom libraries from across the country into the Unbanned Book Network, assisting them in diversifying their collections and building out their student spaces!

Into creepy stories? Enjoy a weird medieval legend? The Green Children of Woolpit is an eerie retelling of real events as described in two different medieval chronicles about green-skinned children who turned up speaking a language no one understood. More here: www.jandersoncoats.com/the-green-ch...

Another point to show that most people do not want book bans. The outrage (as usual) is manufactured.

Hello friends! Just a quick note to remind everyone that I write books, and when you buy them, I can eat. Thank you! www.jandersoncoats.com

When you use AI to do your writing, you are telling your audience: “I deserve your attention, but you do not deserve my effort.”

Thread. Most of these things cost only a little of your time and they are more helpful than you might expect.

At every screening of @thelibrariansfilm.bsky.social, people ask how they can stop book-banning. Besides voting, one of the most impactful things you can do is run for office. Get the book banners out of the seats on school board, library board, town council, and up. Learn how at www.readleadrun.org

Just me finding a whole a** website devoted to maps of roads in medieval France and wondering what the hell we all did before the internet. I mean, I know what we all did. I have whole a** binders full of paper maps I collected over years and years at copiers in libraries. Nerds gonna nerd. 📚❤️📚

Yes pleeeeease!

*grabbyhands* *grabbyhands* *grabbyhands*

This book is heartbreaking and maddening and hard to read and critically important and absolutely worth your time.

As abstracts of academic books go, this one certainly has you wanting to read on more than most:

The Anthropic book theft settlement is essentially done, but many more battles remain. I also agree with Catherynne M. Valente's recent essay calling the settlement "blood money." 1/ www.patreon.com/posts/155693...

Looking for YA with no romance? The Loss of the Burying Ground is about two girls who grew up during a longstanding war, each convinced their enemy was pure evil but now must work together to rescue themselves from a desert island. Oh, and there are pirates. www.jandersoncoats.com/the-loss-of-...

In my latest for @publisherswkly.bsky.social, I interviewed 10 LGBTQ+ authors about their upcoming nonfiction or historical fiction books about queer and trans community building and safety in the face of oppression and violence.

Got a new sofa. Was worried Doomkitty would hate it.

Happy #WeNeedDiverseBooksDay, friends!

Update, even more Not A Drill: Ancient Mesopotamian Toilet Demons and the Lion-Centaurs Who Fought Them.

Sayantani DasGupta on Museums and Mourning, Art and Immigrant Joy buff.ly/F457DFs

Two veterinarians Four prescription medications Two compounding pharmacies One supplement Way too much in the way of $$ out the door every month One absolute gd delight of a feline unit

Fuck this. As an industry, we are in an existential crisis of book banning because of homophobia and transphobia weaponized by racist authoritarians. “Dirty books” are not the problem. Censorship is. Make whatever books you like, but don’t you dare call other books dirty in your shitty marketing.

cookie time 🍪

For the afternoon folks - the new cover for my YA historical, The Wicked and the Just!

The whole world is on fire, but I’ve got to buy the cat food, so it’s time for a cover reveal! Some of you playing along at home may be familiar with my debut YA novel, The Wicked and the Just. It’s set in thirteenth-century Wales, and it’s about medieval teens behaving badly. 🧵 1/

Cosigned. Please hire human artists, or use your own human brain to make art.

5Calls is very good & I used it this morning. Link: 5calls.org And no, it’s not enough, but it’s not nothing.

If a kid you know is excited about the Artemis mission, maybe they would be interested in my middle grade novel, THE COUNTDOWN CONSPIRACY! A near-future, science-accurate space program thriller about kids training to go to Mars, published by HarperCollins Children's. #KidLit #MG #Artemis

When you get to the Day Job and find out that one of the storytime parents has brought in a whole-ass homemade pie for the library workers.

No child is safe in a school library stripped of its books when someone with an unregulated AR15 comes to school. HR 7661 will remove any book with "sexually oriented" materials, which could mean literally anything, and also ALL books about trans kids. This isn't about safety, this is bigotry.

I've seen people trying to defend it today by saying "No, no, I just use it to brainstorm, bounce ideas, I do the actual writing" and with all the kindness in the world I need to tell you: if there is a stage of writing you are not good at, you need to get good, not use the plagiarism machine.

Everything is on fire, but here is a small thing I'm happy about. 📚❤️📚

"I've always hated process of actually creating a new thing that didn't exist before I wrote it. If I get a computer to steal and regurgitate other people's work, it's kind of fun. Because I'm not in any way an actual writer, and I have to fake it."

This. Today and every day.