Posts Tagged Giveaways

STEM Tuesday Winner of Copy of Patricia Newman’s Book

Congratulations to Katie G.!  You have won a copy of Patricia Newman’s book:

 

Watch your email for information on how to get us your address.

Thanks to everyone who read the post and commented. We are thrilled that you stopped by. If you have comments/suggestions/ or just want to give us a shout out, feel free to email us at stemmuf@gmail.com

Don’t forget to tune in this Tuesday to join us when we kick of our month of “Science in Fiction Books”.

We have some amazing books to share with you!

#STEMRocks!

STEM TUESDAY: Zoology – Interview with Author Patricia Newman and Giveaway

Welcome to STEM Tuesday: Author Interview & Book Giveaway, a repeating feature for the fourth Tuesday of every month. Go Science-Tech-Engineering-Math! 

 

Our inaugural interview is with author Patricia Newman who wrote this month’s featured book, Zoo Scientists to the Rescue.

Patricia Newman writes middle-grade nonfiction that inspires kids to seek connections between science, literacy, and the environment. The recipient of the Green Earth Book Award and a finalist for the AAAS/Subaru Science Books and Films Award, her books have received starred reviews, been honored as Junior Library Guild Selections, and included on Bank Street College’s Best Books lists.

Zoo Scientists to the Rescue is photo-illustrated by Annie Crawley. Newman (center) and Crawley (left) traveled to the zoos featured in the book, including Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo where Maku the black rhino (right) resides.

Mary Kay Carson: Tell us a bit about Zoo Scientists to the Rescue and how you came to write it.

Patricia Newman: Zoo Scientists to the Rescue began as a comment from my niece, Mia, whose fifth-grade class was tasked with writing a persuasive essay about zoos, either for or against. The trouble was the teacher gave her students almost all anti-zoo material, so guess which way their essays leaned? I’ve been involved with zoos most of my adult life and I raised a zookeeper, so I knew there was more to the story than the material my niece had received. In Zoo Scientists to the Rescue I had several goals:  share some of the ground-breaking research that zoo scientists are doing to save endangered species, inspire kids to help them, and excite kids about a possible career in science.

MKC: It sounds like you spent some quality time behind-the-scenes at zoos with the featured scientists. Do you have a favorite moment or happening you’d like to share?

PN: Photographer Annie Crawley and I visited the three zoos in the book’s pages—Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C., the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, and the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs. We spent some fabulous time behind-the-scenes with both the scientists and the animals. We got up close and personal with Maku the rhino—close enough that he charged Annie while shooting his portrait for the cover. We also drove through a blizzard to meet with the black-footed ferret scientists. At the zoo, we donned booties and surgical caps to visit the BFF breeding area. And we waded through drifts several feet deep to observe BFFs at boot camp–a training facility to get them ready for release into the wild. Through it all, my audio recorder whirred and Annie’s shutter clicked. Annie is also a brilliant filmmaker, and had the presence of mind to shoot video while we conducted our research. In addition to our trailer, videos featuring our interviews with Jeff Baughman at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo’s BFF breeding center and Rachel Santymire’s lab at the Lincoln Park Zoo are now available on YouTube. Annie and I love the way these resources broaden the reading experience.

MKC: Why do you choose to write STEM books? 

PN: When I was a kid, my best learning happened when I could make connections to the world. I graduated with a B.S. from Cornell University in the social sciences, but my writing focuses more on environmental nonfiction. I think the thing that attracts me to science is the process of discovery. The scientists I interview have fascinating stories that I hope will inspire kids to think science is cool or encourage their parents to buy deforestation-free palm oil products to protect orangutans or instigate a Ditch the Straw Campaign in their community to reduce single-use plastic. While every author wants to tell a great story, I also want to empower kids to make a difference.

MKC: For readers who loved Zoo Scientists to the Rescue, what other middle-grade books would you suggest—nonfiction and/or fiction?

PN: For fiction, I love Carl Hiaasen’s Hoot and Eliot Schrefer’s ape quartet (of which three have been published) Endangered, Threatened, and Rescued. For nonfiction, I love Sandra Markle’s The Great Monkey Rescue: Saving the Golden Lion Tamarins and Cindy Trumbore and Susan Roth’s Parrots Over Puerto Rico.

MKC: Could you give us a peek into your process by sharing where you are right now on a current project and how you’re tackling it?

PN: My newest STEM title will release in the fall of 2018. Called Eavesdropping on Elephants: How Listening Helps Conservation, the book follows scientists from Cornell University’s Elephant Listening Project as they listen to the forest elephants of central Africa. Forest elephants are different from the more familiar African savanna elephants and Asian elephants and the dense vegetation of their rainforest home makes them nearly impossible to follow. But these scientists have opened a whole new world on the study—and conservation—of this endangered species. My editor and I have just finished the first revision pass—I call it the reorganization phase. We move entire paragraphs from the end to the beginning, we check to be sure concepts are developed throughout the manuscript and don’t just pop up in isolated places, and we clarify some complex scientific concepts for young readers. In this book, it’s the physics of sound. The next pass will involve more line edits and polishing. And there’s a multi-media surprise in store for readers of this book. But I won’t say more than that!

More about Zoo Scientists to the Rescue:

Win a copy of Zoo Scientists to the Rescue! Enter the giveaway by leaving a comment below. The randomly-chosen winner will be contacted via email and asked to provide a mailing address (within the U.S. only) to receive the book. Good luck!

Your host this week is Mary Kay Carson, author of Mission to Pluto and other nonfiction books for kids.

 

Interview with Author Amy Stewart and a Wicked Bug Giveaway

 

Today we welcome New York Times bestselling author Amy Stewart and we are giving away a copy of her new book for middle-grade readers, Wicked Bugs: The Meanest, Deadliest, Grossest Bugs on Earth (Algonquin Books 2017).

Amy Stewart is the award-winning author of six books on the perils and pleasures of the natural world, including four New York Times bestsellers The Drunken Botanist, Wicked Bugs, Wicked Plants, and Flower Confidential. She is also the author of the Kopp Sisters series. Stewart and her husband own Eureka Books in Eureka, California. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the American Horticulture Society’s Book Award, and an International Association of Culinary Professionals Food Writing Award. 

 Illustrator Briony Morrow-Cribbs studied art at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, British Columbia, and currently lives in Brattleboro, Vermont, where she owns and operates Twin Vixen Press

About Wicked Bugs Young Readers Edition: The Meanest, Deadliest, Grossest Bugs on Earth (Algonquin Books 2017):

Did you know there are zombie bugs that not only eat other bugs but also inhabit and control their bodies? There’s even a wasp that delivers a perfectly-placed sting in a cockroach’s brain and then leads the roach around by its antennae — like a dog on a leash. Scorpions glow in ultraviolet light. Lots of bugs dine on corpses. And if you want to know how much it hurts to get stung by a bullet ant (hint: it really, really hurts), you can consult the Schmidt Sting Pain Index. It ranks the pain produced by ants and other stinging creatures. How does it work? Dr. Schmidt, the scientist who created it, voluntarily subjected himself to the stings of 150 species.

 Organized into thematic categories (Everyday Dangers, Unwelcome Invaders, Destructive Pests, and Terrible Threats) and featuring full-color illustrations by Briony Morrow-CribbsWicked Bugs is an educational and creepy-cool guide to the worst of the worst of insects, arachnids, and other arthropods. This is the young readers adaptation of Amy Stewart’s bestselling book for adult readers.

 
First question: Why bugs?

Wicked Bugs is the sequel to Wicked Plants, a book I wrote in 2009 about deadly, dangerous, offensive, illegal, and otherwise horrible plants that have affected humans–mostly for the worst. It was my way of looking at the dark side of the plant world, and telling rather bone-chilling stories that don’t often get told about the surprisingly powerful world of plants!

Wicked Bugs seemed like a natural follow-up. In fact, as I was researching Wicked Plants, I kept running across interesting stories about venom, insect-transmitted diseases, and so forth in the medical literature. I just started keeping a list, and pretty soon, I had another collection of stories.

The irony is that people are very trusting of plants, assuming that anything green that grows out of the ground is all natural and therefore good for you. But I had no trouble rounding up a list of truly terrifying plants. Plants can’t run away and hide from predators, so they fight back in ways that can really inflict a lot of pain and suffering.

For Wicked Bugs, on the other hand, I actually had a hard time coming up with a list of insects, spiders, and so forth that we actually should worry about.  People are generally far more terrified of bugs than plants, but in fact, I had trouble filling a book with actually “wicked” bugs!

 In your introduction, you discuss your use of the word “bug.” Can you tell our readers about it?  How did you choose which critters to include?

 Entomologists will be quick to point out that they use the word “bug” to refer to a specific type of insect with piercing and sucking mouthparts. An aphid, therefore, is a “bug,” but an ant is not. This book covers all manner of slithering, creeping, and crawling creatures, from insects to spiders to worms. In that sense, I’m using the word “bug” in the more ancient sense, dating back to the 1620s, when it was used to refer to any sort of little insect-like creature.

How did you approach research for the book?

 I interviewed toxicologists, physicians, and entomologists. I read a lot of medical and scientific journals, scoured old newspapers, and did original, primary research to try to debunk myths and avoid repeating old, false information. Although this looks like a small, light-hearted book, I do quite a bit of research. For instance, I would never repeat a fact from a modern book along the lines of “the ancient Greeks used wasps for warfare.” I’d need to trace that to the source–and I don’t just mean a more authoritative Greek scholar, I mean the original source text, which, fortunately, has probably been digitized and can be found in a research library somewhere in the world. I’ve hired translators to translate 500 year-old German texts and even Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Tell us about the decision to publish a young readers’ edition of your 2011 New York Times best seller for adults, Wicked Bugs: The Louse That Conquered Napoleon’s Army & Other Diabolical Insects.

I do quite a lot of events around the country at science museums, botanical gardens, libraries, and so forth. At those events I will often meet teachers and parents who are really eager to find interesting science books for their kids and students. I confess that because I’m not a parent myself, I wasn’t aware of the changes that Common Core and other educational standards have brought to the classroom, but teachers and parents brought me up to date! They told me that literature and writing are being integrated into other subjects, like science and history. Because Wicked Bugs combines all of those things–science, history, and storytelling–it really fit the bill.

 How does this middle grade version differ from the adult version?

We had the text professionally edited to fit the right age and grade level, and we removed just a little bit of “adult’ content.  We also made it into a full-color edition by using hand-colored versions of Briony Morrow-Cribbs’ extraordinary copperplate etchings. As you might know, copper etchings were used to illustrate scientific books three hundred years ago. It’s almost a lost art today. But Briony took up the challenge, often working from real specimens at her university entomology department, wearing jeweler’s glasses to see every tiny detail.

If there was one single thing that you wanted young readers to get from Wicked Bugs, what would it be?

Honestly, I just want them to enjoy the book. I write for entertainment–to entertain myself, and to entertain readers.

 Do you have plans for any other books for young readers?

I very much hope that my publisher will want to do Wicked Plants! There are other books about bugs out there for this age group, but it seems to me that botany is a very underserved subject for young readers. There’s a definite Harry Potter vibe to Wicked Plants–poisons and potions and so forth–but it’s also an engaging look at botany and a good way into the subject. If anybody out there thinks Wicked Plants would make a good next book, please send me your thoughts!

You have published both fiction and nonfiction. Do you have a preference? How does your writing process differ?

Right now I’m writing a series of novels (Girl Waits with Gun, Lady Cop Makes Trouble, and Miss Kopp’s Midnight Confessions) [for adults] based on the true story of one of America’s first female deputy sheriffs and her sisters.

It’s great because the research is really the same, but the writing is very free, because I can make things up if I have to. Also, I’m no longer writing in my own voice, and I do get tired of the sound of Amy Stewart in my head all the time.  Now I’m writing in the voice of a woman who lived in the 1910s, and that’s a great challenge. There will be many more books in that series to come!

And now for the giveaway!

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