Award-winning author Naomi Shihab Nye, whose 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East was a finalist for the National Book Award, has released a new collection of poems for girls entitled A Maze Me. Covering topics from first love to family, hopes and dreams, these 72 poems will challenge, comfort and confound, as all good poetry does. The book is graced by an introduction that will encourage young readers to listen to their inner voice, ask questions and write. Says the author, Whenever I meet a girl who's about eleven or twelve or thirteen or even older, I want to talk to her. Ask her things. See what she's looking at, off beyond the world we can see together. It's a huge time in life, that delicious and complicated movement from one era to another, and it can feel like a treasure or a precipice or both. This collection is indeed a treasure for readers to carry on that journey.
Deborah Hopkinson is a writer (though not a poet) whose newest picture book, Saving Strawberry Farm, a story set in the Great Depression, will be released in May.
