Suzanne Collins and Walter Dean Myers at BEA
Stop the presses! Or start them - please! Suzanne Collins is at BookExpo America in New York this week to promote her upcoming children's book Year of the Jungle, and she revealed to USA Today that she has plans to write another teen series. But first she has to work on a couple little projects called Mockingjay Parts 1 & 2:
Suzanne Collins, author of the best-selling The Hunger Games trilogy, plans to write another teen series but isn't ready to reveal more.
First, she says, she's consulting on the scripts for the third and fourth film adaptations of her dystopian series that has more than 50 million copies in print. (Catching Fire, the second movie, again starring Jennifer Lawrence, will be released Nov. 22. And nearly four years after the book's publication, the paperback of Catching Fire finally hits stores Tuesday. Mockingjay, the series finale, will be split into two films, out in 2014 and 2015).
On Sept. 10, Collins releases an autobiographical picture book, Year of the Jungle, illustrated by James Proimos, about her memories of 1968, when she was 6, and her father had "to go to something called a war…in a place called Vietnam." At a discussion Thursday night on writing about war for young readers, sponsored by her publisher, Scholastic, Collins said if kids "have no idea what propaganda is, how will you ever know when it's being used against you?"
She was joined by Walter Dean Myers, whose World War II novel, Invasion (out Oct. 1), is a prequel to Fallen Angels (about Vietnam) and Sunrise Over Fallujah (Iraq). Myers, whose brother was killed in Vietnam and whose son served in Iraq, was asked why he keeps writing novels that depict the horrors of war. He replied, "because we keep having wars."