If You Love Your Library, Learn Who Pays for It
Why Public-Library Funding Matters Long Before the Budget Cuts Arrive
Excuse My Whimsy
A place to follow along as I write children's books and think deeply about picture books, libraries, and childhood wonder.
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Mac Barnett Is Right. Except When He Isn’t.
On Make Believe, children’s literature, and the limits of a very short book
Who Can Actually Read in America?
Literacy is not a light switch and the statistics are more complicated than the headlines suggest.
Painting Colorful Animals
Video 2: The Underpainting
Painting Colorful Animals
Video 1: Getting Started
The Very Hungry Slop Machine
Why Children Deserve Better Than AI-Generated Books
Live with Rachel Bachman
A recording from Rachel Bachman's live video
Books for Children Who Feel Everything
Five recent picture books that make room for sensitivity, sadness, and wonder
Live with Rachel Bachman
A recording from Rachel Bachman's live video
Reluctant, or Overruled?
Why children’s reading preferences deserve more respect than adults often give them.
Where Did the Boy Books Go?
The missing realistic middle-grade stories boys need to keep reading.
A Frog, a Log, and a Dead Story
The Dangers of Choosing to Write Your Picture Book in Rhyme
Live with Rachel Bachman
A recording from Rachel Bachman's live video
Spooky Is Not a Season
Six Picture Books to Read this Summerween
When the Book in the Mail Stops Coming
What funding cuts to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library reveal about how we value early literacy.
The Best Picture Books Are Built, Not Just Written
What makes these deceptively simple books work
Underpaid, Overqualified, and Smiling
The self-sacrificing competition inside libraries, museums, and other feminized workplaces
The Safe Place for Danger
On the stories children reach for when the adults finally let them
I Sang the Song. I Read the Book. Did It Matter?
On the beautiful, ridiculous, hard-to-measure work of early literacy.
Gen Z Parents Don’t Hate Books
They Hate All the Judgment that Comes with It