With Mother’s Day just behind us and Father’s Day on the horizon, it’s only fitting that this Sunday is National Children’s Day in the U.S. Although the origins of a national children’s day go back to ...

"There was a boy named Emile / who fell in love with a field," poet Kevin Young writes. "It was wide and blue — and if you could have seen it / so would've you." Emile and the Field is the story of a ...

Susan Cooper's poem "The Shortest Day," celebrating the winter solstice, is also a children's book illustrated by Carson Ellis. They collaborated by mail. SUSAN COOPER: (Reading) So the shortest day ...

When poetry editor Lou Peacock compiled A Whale of a Time: Funny Poems for Each Day of the Year, she chose Rita Dove’s “The First Book” to be the entry for January 1. The poem describes what it’s like ...

When I was a child and a blank slate, literarily speaking, I loved anthologies of all sorts—books of diverse mystery stories, books of nonsense poems, books that allowed you to dip in and out of a ...