The next book I'm illustrating for Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers: NAKED!

How cool is this? And apparently Michael wrote the story with me in mind as the illustrator. I've already started work on the sketches and am having soooo much fun.

Entertainment Weekly posted an article about the news. Wow, I've never been mentioned in an Exclusive before. My editor gave me a heads-up that it would appear in EW but I wasn't sure exactly when -- my friend Cathy Rutland was the first one to let me know it was online!

I also posted the news in my own blog.

NAKED! is going to be published in the Summer of 2014.

My contributor's copies of TOMO arrived! Proceeds benefit teens affected by the 2011 Japan Earthquake

YAY! My contributor's copies of TOMO arrived today!! TOMO (which means "friend" in Japanese) features 36 stories for teens by authors and artists around the world. One of these stories is by me: it's my very first graphic short story, which is sort of a fantasy/romance/horror. Here's the first page:

Looking forward to reading other stories!

A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book will benefit teens affected by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Please do consider buying a copy, and tell your friends! You can point them to this online postcard about TOMO.

Find out more about the anthology here: tomoanthology.blogspot.com/ (includes an interview with me)

From Kirkus Reviews:

A broadly appealing mix of the tragic and droll, comforting, disturbing, exotic and universal, with nary a clinker in the bunch.

Buy on Indiebound

Buy on Amazon (On sale for $9.95 right now)

Be sure to visit the Tomo website to learn about our events this March at Boston Children's Museum and the New York Public Library in Manhattan.

Step-by-step process: how I created an illustration for I'M BORED

For those interested, I've posted about what went into creating the "little girl pretending to be a rampaging monster" image in the spread from I'M BORED above. Includes step-by-step images, photo from my meeting at Simon & Schuster, and the final spread.

SCBWI Summer Conference report reposted for public access

It turns out that the report I posted earlier can only be viewed by those who have SCBWI website accounts, so the SCBWI Illustration Committee kindly granted me permission to repost somewhere publicly accessible. So here's the link, with EXTRA photos:

How a rejection got me a book deal: My career-changing SCBWI Summer Conference experience