I can’t announce the details quite yet, but I’m delighted to have a new nonfiction adaptation in the works. It will be an illustrated book for kids 8 to 12 years old on a fascinating topic in animal behavior. The original book is wonderful, well researched and entertaining; it will be fun as well as challenging to adapt it for a younger audience.
Category Archives: Nonfiction
New book launches today
When my agent approached me about the possibility of adapting Naomi Klein’s writings on climate change and social justice into a book for young readers, I was over the moon. A dream project indeed! Adapting the work of a journalist and writer whom I admire immensely, who deals with subjects about which I care passionately, focusing on kids as activists. Today I’m even further over the moon, possibly halfway to Mars, because the book has been launched out into the world.
Working on this project was a treat from start to finish. Everyone involved was thoughtful, creative, and supportive all the way. But the number-one takeaway from the year I spent on this book is my new awareness of how determined, ingenious, and clear-sighted young activists are. All of the young people whose activism and passion are highlighted in the book insist that the future–everyone’s future–is worth fighting. This was for me a sustaining force during the year of the coronavirus pandemic, and it inspires me to hope that we can transform how we live and produce energy.
Will young activists really change everything? I don’t know–but I know they’ll give their all to the effort. I hope that with this book, we’ve handed them some useful tools. I can’t wait to see what they do.
New nonfiction: Civil Rights and Climate Justice
My YA adaptation of Bruce Watson’s riveting book Freedom Summer came out this month, published by Seven Stories Press. It was a tremendous honor to be chosen to adapt this powerful story for young readers. I’m especially happy that the book includes the voices of many of the young people who went to Mississippi for that murderous, momentous summer and of the Black activists who taught, fought, died, and inspired.
In February 2021 Simon & Schuster will publish How to Change Everything, in which I adapted the climate and social justice writings of Naomi Klein into a volume for young people. Drawing on her experiences in settings as diverse as the Great Barrier Reef and the pipeline protest at Standing Rock, as well as on her years of reporting on topics such as disaster capitalism and climate change, How to Change Everything highlights the important work of young activists around the world and offers inspiration and tools for others–young or old–who want to change the world for the better.
Lies for kids
Lies My Teacher Told Me is a terrific book–informative, engaging and sometimes enraging, and frequently entertaining. In it, sociologist James W. Loewen takes a clear-eyed look at American history and 
a critical look at the way most textbooks teach it. I’m very happy to say that my next book will be a YA adaptation of Lies, to be published next year by The New Press. It was just the project I needed at this time of polarized viewpoints, truthiness, and “fake news”: a level-headed history of our country that gives young people tools that will help them become informed citizens. I can’t wait until the YA version of Lies My Teacher Told Me hits the streets.
Collaborating with Charles Darwin
Just half a year from now, Simon & Schuster will publish my young readers edition of the most important scientific book ever written. 
I was twenty-three, an earnest grad student in English, when I first read Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. In the years that followed, as my nonfiction writing career took me deeper into writing science books for kids, I reread the Origin several times, alongside many more recent works on natural history and evolutionary biology. So once I’d published YA adaptations of books by Howard Zinn, Jared Diamond, and others, it was perhaps inevitable that I’d think, “What about Darwin?” And here we are.
A reviewer once called me “the redoubtable Stefoff.” I hope it was redoubtable, not rash, of me to interpret Darwin’s thoughts and words for today’s young readers. (Bonus: Not just for kids. It’s for anyone who’d like to read a shortened, streamlined, illustrated version of the Origin.)