Dan Coleman

In April, my kids and I were lucky enough to see a performance of Ric Averill’s The Runaway Orchestra at the Lawrence Arts Center.  Among the play’s many charms were giant paper mache heads worn by actors portraying various characters.  These puppets were created in a special course taught by the Arts Center’s 2018-2019 printmaker artist-in-residence…

This time of year always reminds me of a cat I once knew named Inez. At least, that’s what we called her, or “Eenie” for short, since she was on the small side. We adopted her from the shelter when she was six months old, but she turned out so wild we couldn’t keep her…

With Golden Globes bestowed and the Oscars on the way, awards season is here. Children’s literature nerds have the morning of January 28th marked on their calendars to gather round their screens for the closest thing librarians have to the red carpet: the live webcast of the ALA Youth Media Awards.  I love awards and…

One of my favorite small wonders of Lawrence is the architectural model of the University of Kansas campus, currently located on the 3rd Floor of the Kansas Union. My kids love it as much as I do, so we worried when it disappeared earlier this year. Much to our relief, it reappeared a few months…

Every time I walk past the library’s new circulating board game collection, I remember all the spinners, dice, and busted game box corners in the basements of my childhood. We played the classics—Chinese Checkers, Connect 4, Risk—but also games that date me, based on TV shows I loved as a '70’s kid, like CHiPs and…

Growing up, whenever I refused his advice or repeated a mistake my dad had warned me against, he was fond of invoking an expression that never made any sense to me: "Buy 'em books and buy 'em books, and they still eat the covers." All these years later, in my work at the library weeding…

In my years selecting children’s books for the library, I have often envied the mathematical certainty of the hard sciences.  After all, when the Pythagorean theorem doesn’t work, it’s usually our own bad arithmetic at fault, and Plank’s Constant isn’t exactly wishy-washy.  It’s a little more difficult to make sense of children’s literature sometimes.  Perhaps…