The Spring/Summer issue of Pen&inc. is out soon – and you can subscribe now to ensure you get the latest copy posted through your door. Pen&inc. is CILIP’s magazine and listing guide that celebrates the best in inclusive and representative books for children and young people.

Your subscription helps support our work and allows others to enjoy the free to access digital edition. It costs less than £10 a year, including postage, and includes features and interviews with authors, illustrators, and poets, as well as hundreds of listings for new titles to help keep your collections fresh and inclusive.

Coming up in the Spring/Sumer issue – Waterstones Children’s Laureate, Joseph Coelho on his anthology of new poets, Spin; the new poets featured in Spin; artist and illustrator Yurong; Vivi Conway author Lizzie Huxley-Jones; Elle McNicoll, author of A kind of Spark and follow-up Keedle; and much more.

There’s plenty to get excited about, including some great content around neurodiversity. Don’t forget to subscribe if you want to receive your copies through the door. Read on for an extract from our upcoming Joseph Coelho interview

Joseph Coelho: Words and wonder

POETRY has a power to touch people in ways that other writing can struggle to emulate. It may be brief in length, but its impact can be long-lasting - leaving the reader (or listener) with interpretations and meaning that are as individual as they are.

Children’s Laureate Joseph Coelho has seen how poetry, how his own words, can alter perceptions and build new understanding of the world around us and the world within. He says: “Because it is writing that often deals with matters of the heart. Poetry talks of our emotions, our loves and fears, our worries and dislikes and lays them out in a bitesized digestible form. It is a form that connects with young and old equally if they are given the opportunities to find poems that speak to them and (critically) to see themselves as poets.”

There is an accessibility around poetry that may not be present in longer form writing. A poem can be finished in minutes, so even reluctant readers can delve into them and there are ways to make poetry bring a love of reading to life. Often the biggest barrier to developing a love of poetry is that it is not seen or heard.

Joseph says: “First and foremost it needs to be remembered that children mimic so if they see a rich reading culture in their schools that includes all sorts of mediums and materials (novels, non-fiction, comics, magazines, online sites) then they will, by osmosis, absorb those habits.

An announcement was made and every single person in that school - every student, every member of staff, even visiting guests would have to down tools and read. Practices like these are wonderful at showing children that reading is for everyone. Poetry, being a short medium, is very easy to slip into the school day.

“Teachers can take advantage of my Poetry Prompts over on the booktrust website (www.booktrust.org.uk/poetryprompts). A new video goes live every Monday and in those videos I share a fun and accessible way to write a poem. Each video has purposefully been designed to be no more than 10 minutes in length so that videos can be put on during registration or during the last ten minutes of the school day.

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