Arthur turns 30!

Arthur Is Turning 30! 

So, grab your library card and join the friends from Elwood City for ARTHUR’s 30-Day Reading Challenge during the month of November!

The Challenge: 

Children ages 4-8 are invited to participate as part of a classroom, library program, afterschool program, homeschool group, or family reading routine.

How It Works:

• Read for 30 minutes a day throughout November.

• Track your reading using the challenge materials.

• Read independently, read with a grown-up, listen to someone read,

or read to a younger sibling, friend, or even a pet. It all counts!

FREE Reading Challenge Resources:

Access ARTHUR’s 30-Day Reading Challenge Digital Toolkit, packed with everything you need to get started:

• A 4-page Reading Challenge Guide with tips, rules, activities, and helpful links

• 4 themed booklists with discussion questions and reading ideas

• 4 weekly reading trackers to help kids celebrate their progress

• A Certificate of Achievement and fun printable activities

Click here to access the Digital Toolkit!

Book of the Week (10/5/2026)

What Clever Friends: The Selected Letters of Jane Kenyon and Alice Mattison edited by Chad Wriglesworth (University of Michigan Press, 2026)

What Clever Friends, is a selection of engaging, frank letters between poet Jane Kenyon and fiction writer Alice Mattison. Ranging from their first meeting in 1979 to Kenyon’s death in 1995, this fifteen-year conversation between close friends reveals their experiences pursuing writing while living out the responsibilities of ordinary life. Writing to each other often, they help each other, confide in each other, and argue through the strains of rejection and acceptance, good reviews and bad, periods in which writing comes easily or when it does not. Over time, both writers emerged from obscurity to gain award-winning recognition as prominent voices in their respective genres.

Witty, tender, and aware; tempestuous and lyrical, these letters trace the evolution of a deep and largely unknown friendship that situates Kenyon’s work within a collaborative environment of other poets and novelists who were committed to the flourishing of contemporary women’s writing. With more than 500 edited and annotated letters, a retrospective foreword written by Alice Mattison, and a scholarly introduction written by Chad Wriglesworth, What Clever Friends conveys a compelling story that will interest readers and writers. --Publisher's blurb

About the authors:

Jane Kenyon, former New Hampshire Poet Laureate grew up in the Midwestern U.S. She earned a B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1970 and an M.A. in 1972. As a university student, Kenyon met poet Donald Hall (also a former NH Poet Laureate). In 1972, they married and moved to his ancestral home in Wilmot, New Hampshire. Kenyon died in 1995 from leukemia.

Alice Mattison was born in Brooklyn and attended Queens College and Harvard University, where she received a doctorate in literature. She has lived in New Haven, Connecticut since the 1970s and has taught fiction in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Writing at Bennington College since 1995. Mattison began her career as a poet, but also began writing short stories in the 1980s.

3 on a Theme: Brothers & Sisters

The Chicken Sisters by KJ Dell'Antonia

Blood Brother: Jonathan Daniels and His Sacrifice for Civil Rights by Rich Wallace and Sandra Neil Wallace

My Sister, the Freak: A Graphic Novel by Dani Jones

NHBF Author: Alexandra Villasante

Alexandra Villasante has always loved telling stories—though not always with words. She has a BFA in Painting and an MA in Combined Media (that’s art school speak for making work out of anything). Born in New Jersey to immigrant parents, Alex has the privilegio of dreaming in both English and Spanish.
Her latest novel, Fireblooms, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and praise from Kirkus and Booklist. It was selected as one of NPR’s Books We Love 2025. Alex’s debut YA novel, The Grief Keeper, was a Fall 2019 Junior Library Guild Gold Selection and winner of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Children’s Literature/Young Adult Fiction. She's a contributor to several Young Adult short story anthologies including, Our Shadows Have Claws, Relit: 16 Latinx Remixes of Classic Stories and We Mostly Come Out at Night: 15 Queer Tales of Monsters Angels and Other Creatures. Alex is a co-founder of the Latinx Kidlit Book Festival and of the LKBF Latinx Storytellers Conference. When she’s not writing, planning or painting, Alex works for Boyds Mills, formerly known as the Highlights Foundation. 

This author is scheduled to appear at the NH Book Festival which will be held at the Capitol Center for the Arts & NHBF Festival Village on South Main Street in Concord, NH on October 2-3, 2026.  

NHBF Author: S. J. Taylor

S. J. Taylor writes stories steeped in folklore and magic, where young protagonists tackle big adventures and bigger questions. Although she grew up in Arizona's desert, her heart yearns for the Nordic lands. When she's not writing, she can often be found knitting yet another sweater (sweater weather is the best weather). She lives in Connecticut with her family.

This author is scheduled to appear at the NH Book Festival which will be held at the Capitol Center for the Arts & NHBF Festival Village on South Main Street in Concord, NH on October 2-3, 2026.

NHBF Author: Jacquelyn Stolos

Jacquelyn Stolos is the author of the novels Edendale and Asterwood. She holds an MFA in fiction from New York University where she was a Writers in the Public Schools Fellow. Jacquelyn has won fellowships from the New York State Summer Writers Institute and the Community of Writers. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Bodega Magazine, No Tokens, Joyland and more. She is the co-founder of Los Angeles’s Something Something Reading Series.

This author is scheduled to appear at the NH Book Festival which will be held at the Capitol Center for the Arts & NHBF Festival Village on South Main Street in Concord, NH on October 2-3, 2026.

NHBF Author: Dan Simon

Dan Simon is the founder and editor-in-chief of Seven Stories Press. He is the co-author, with Jack Hoffman, of Run Run Run: The Lives of Abbie Hoffman and translator of Van Gogh: Self Portraits by Pascal Bonafoux. Ashland is his debut novel. He lives in New York and New Hampshire.

This author is scheduled to appear at the NH Book Festival which will be held at the Capitol Center for the Arts & NHBF Festival Village on South Main Street in Concord, NH on October 2-3, 2026.