David*Macinnis*Gill.com

Balkin Bud­dies is spon­sor­ing a raf­fle of a num­ber of online chats with authors and artists and invite schools and libraries to participate.

All you need is a com­puter with a cam­era (many com­put­ers come embed­ded with this now), a micro­phone and speak­ers (also built in to most com­put­ers), and an account with iChat or Skype. Direc­tions for how to get set up on iChat and Skype can be found at balkinbuddies.com/onlineauthorsavailable.html.

To be eli­gi­ble for the raf­fle, you must:

(a) have an audi­ence of at least 10 or more stu­dents (school chil­dren or uni­ver­sity stu­dents study­ing to be teach­ers or librar­i­ans). Please note that for larger audi­ences, you would need an activboard or some other means to enlarge the chat onto a larger screen;

(b) send the fol­low­ing infor­ma­tion to cather­ine [at] balk­in­bud­dies [dot] com or balk­in­bud­dies [at] aol [dot] com by no later than Feb­ru­ary 15, 2010:

- your name
– your school or library affil­i­a­tion
– your email
– your tele­phone num­ber
– the grade lev­els which you serve.

Win­ners will be picked from a hat within a day or two after that and will be noti­fied within a week.

Sev­eral win­ners will be cho­sen and may pick the author of their choice. How­ever, an author will not serve as a prize more than once, and each author will go to who­ever con­tacts us first. So if you are named a win­ner and are anx­ious to have one author over another, you would have to con­tact us as soon as pos­si­ble upon noti­fi­ca­tion of being a win­ner. This infor­ma­tion will be repeated should you be named a winner.

Balkin Bud­dies’ authors & artists par­tic­i­pat­ing in the raf­fle are: Ann Angel, Jen­nifer Arm­strong, Tom Bird­s­eye, Vicki Cobb, Dorothy Dono­hue, Paul Fleisher, Jan Spivey Gilchrist, Jake Halpern, Ger­ald and Loretta Haus­man, Patri­cia Her­mes, Ali­son Jack­son, Frané Lessac, Eliz­a­beth Levy, Robert Lip­syte, Emily Arnold McCully, Wen­dell Minor, Carol Nevius, Lesléa New­man, Matt Novak, Darcy Pat­ti­son, Joanne Rock­lin, Dave Ross, Elaine Scott, Kim Siegel­son, Dashka Slater, Edward T. Sul­li­van, Arthur Yorinks, Lara M. Zeises, and Liz­a­beth Zindel.

We look for­ward to hear­ing from you.

Cather­ine Balkin

Balkin Bud­dies

Brook­lyn, NY

Tel 718 857 7605

Balk­in­Bud­dies [at] aol [dot] com