I’m super excited for this year’s screenings of the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival! It’s an annual video contest I founded in which young readers make short movies that tell the entire stories of Newbery-winning books in just a few minutes, often with a weird twist . . . like the above movie from Ogden, Utah’s Treehouse Children’s Museum, a retelling of Louis Sachar’s 1999 Newbery Medal Winner Holes. But instead of being set at an all-boys prison camp in the desert, it takes place at an all-girls finishing school! (Check out more all-time best 90-Second Newbery videos here.)

The 90-Second Newbery Film Festival is in its fourteenth year, believe it or not. In 2025 we’ll be doing live screenings in eight cities: Brooklyn, Chicago, Boston, San Antonio, Rochester NY, Ogden UT, Tacoma WA, and Minneapolis. These screenings are lots of fun, co-hosted by me and other children’s authors . . . and always FREE! And we usually pack the house, with audiences of hundreds, so make your reservations now!

Friday, January 17, 2025
General deadline for submissions to the 14th annual 90-Second Newbery Film Festival. (Special extended deadline of March 24 for submissions to the San Antonio, Boston, Minneapolis, and Tacoma screenings.)

Saturday, February 22, 2025
The BROOKLYN, NY screening of the 14th annual 90-Second Newbery Film Festival. Hosted by me and Newbery Honor winner Rita Williams-Garcia (One Crazy Summer and more). At the Brooklyn Public Library Central Library (10 Grand Army Plaza) in the Dweck Auditorium. 1 pm. Get your FREE tickets here.

Saturday, March 1, 2025
The OGDEN, UTAH screening of the 14th annual 90-Second Newbery Film Festival. Hosted by me and Keir Graff (author of The Tiny Mansion, Minerva Keen’s Detective Club, and more). At the Treehouse Children’s Museum (347 22nd Street). 6 pm. Get your FREE tickets here.

Sunday, March 9, 2025
The CHICAGO screening of the 14th annual 90-Second Newbery Film Festival. Hosted by me and Keir Graff (author of The Tiny Mansion, Minerva Keen’s Detective Club, and more). At the Harold Washington Library Center (400 S State St.) in the Pritzker Auditorium. 2 pm. Get your FREE tickets here.

Monday, March 24, 2025
Special extended deadline for entries for the San Antonio (5/3), Boston (4/12), Minneapolis (4/26), and Tacoma (5/30) screenings of the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival.

Saturday, April 5, 2025
The ROCHESTER, NY screening of the 14th annual 90-Second Newbery Film Festival. At the George Eastman Museum (900 East Ave) in the Dryden Theater. Hosted by me and the legendary Bruce Coville (author of My Teacher is an Alien and more). 2 pm. Get your FREE tickets here.

Saturday, April 12, 2025
The BOSTON screening of the 14th annual 90-Second Newbery Film Festival. Hosted by me and Rebecca Kim Wells (author of Briar Girls, Shatter the Sky, and Storm the Earth). At the Boston Public Library, in Rabb Hall at the Central Library in Copley Square (700 Boylston Street). 3 pm. Get your FREE tickets here.

Saturday, April 26, 2025 (TENTATIVE)
It’s not for sure yet, but we’re planning the MINNEAPOLIS screening of the 14th annual 90-Second Newbery Film Festival at the Minneapolis Central Library (300 Nicollet Mall) in Pohlad Hall. Hosted by me and another author to be named later. Get your FREE tickets here.

Saturday, May 3, 2025
The SAN ANTONIO screening of the 14th annual 90-Second Newbery Film Festival. In the H-E-B Performance Hall at the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts (100 Auditorium Circle). Made possible by our partners at the Bexar County Digital Library Bibliotech and H-E-B Read 3. 11 am. Get your FREE tickets here.

Friday, May 30, 2025
The TACOMA, WA screening of the 14th annual 90-Second Newbery Film Festival. At Grant Center for the Expressive Arts (2510 N 11th St.). Hosted by me and Tacoma’s own Doug Mackey. 5 pm. Get your FREE tickets here.

Big thanks to my co-hosts Rita Williams-Garcia, Keir Graff, Rebecca Kim Wells, Bruce Coville, and Doug Mackey for being part of this.

And it’s not too late to make your own movie for this year’s 90-Second Newbery! It’s open to young filmmakers up to 18 years old, and adult help is totally allowed. The early deadline for submissions to the Brooklyn, Ogden, Chicago, and Rochester shows is January 17, 2025, but there is a later deadline of March 24, 2025 if you only care about submitting to the shows in Boston, San Antonio, Tacoma, or Minneapolis. Here’s how to submit a movie.

Want technical help and moviemaking advice? We have video resources and how-to guides.

Want to bring the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival to YOUR town? Drop me a line at james@90secondnewbery.com!

We’ve already received lots of fantastic movies for the 2025 season . . . and I’m looking forwqrd to seeing more! As always, complete information is at the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival website.

The 90-Second Newbery relies entirely on private donations and grants to keep going! It’s only through your generosity that we can continue bringing our free public screenings and book-to-movie workshops to libraries and schools nationwide. You can make your (tax-deductible!) donation here. Donations are handled through our fiscal sponsor Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization.

“Oh no,” you wail, grabbing me by the shoulders. “What am I going to get my friends and loved ones for Christmas?” you beseech me, tears in your eyes. “I want to get them novels that are weird and interesting, in the genres of fantasy and sci-fi and horror,” you weep, grinding your teeth in frustration. “But I also want these books to be non-obvious picks that showcase my good taste,” you fret, and before I can reply, you hold up your hand and interrupt, “No, James, listen! Because I also want these books to have the reputation of being kind of bizarre, so folks don’t think I’ve lost my edge . . . and gosh darn it, I also want to support independent bookstores! What can I do, James Kennedy? What can I do??”

First of all: calm down. You’re making a spectacle of yourself. Secondly: I have all your holiday gift-giving problems SOLVED. Done and dusted, my friend. Ship-shape and Bristol fashion. All wrapped up, in the bag, over and out, sorted.

“HOW??!?” you essentially shriek, having lost all dignity at this point. And after I give you a big hug, and tuck you in for a long nap, and wake you up hours later with some tea and a chaste kiss on your fevered brow—but alarmingly enough, no longer in the bed you fell asleep in, but rather in a featureless concrete room in a mazelike complex fifty miles beneath my hometown of Troy, Michigan—I whisper to you: “You can get all my books from the indie bookseller The Book Cellar in Chicago. Signed by me, and personalized by me. Shipped anywhere you want. All your problems are over.”

And since you were never a very good friend to begin with, you reply, “Oh really? You write books?” or “Actually I never got around to reading your stuff,” or “Could you please untie these straps holding me to this gurney?”, and as I gently apply the chloroform rag to your nose, and you begin to lose consciousness again, you have a vision of the three books that I’ve written that would be perfect holiday gifts for your cool, creative, and good-looking friends, or punishing gifts for your dull, unimaginative enemies:

How about my adult horror novel Bride of the Tornado? You’ve got small-town creepiness, malevolent tornadoes, a love story gone horribly wrong, and a cult that makes Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” feel like an innocent afternoon of wholesome fun. No less than Delilah S. Dawson, New York Times-bestselling author of Bloom and much more, praised it as “a twisty, startling, atmospheric Midwest Gothic with the unstoppable power of a freight train and the moody ambience of a mist-shrouded diner at midnight. I could not put it down, and the ending left me in pieces.” Get your signed, personalized copy from the Book Cellar here.

“But what if I want to give a gift to my friend is more of a trippy, Philip K. Dick-loving sci-fi fan?” you whimper as your brain dims and you blurrily glimpse me opening my case of exotic surgical instruments. Then you can’t go wrong with . . .

Yes, it’s my adult sci-fi novel Dare to Know! There’s a company that can predict with perfect accuracy the exact time and date that you die. Our washed-up hero is a salesman for the company, where there’s just one rule: you can’t look up your own death-date. At a desperate low point, though, our hero does look himself up, and discovers he had died twenty-three minutes ago. The algorithm is never wrong, but he’s not a ghost, so why does the math fail only for him? This sets him on a quest across America and through his own memories—a phantasmagoria of haunted video games, an occult alternative history of science, the evil side of startup culture, an ancient curse from pre-Columbian America, and dark conspiracy theories about Top 40 music. Get your signed, personalized copy from the Book Cellar here.

“But I want something lighthearted that even children can enjoy—cool children with a healthy sense of the absurd!” you say with your last flicker of consciousness. Buddy, I got ya covered:

It’s my young-adult fantasy The Order of Odd-Fish! Folks, there’s a reason this book is still in print, even though it came out way back in 2008. It’s got a cult following—folks made tons of amazing fan art for it back in the day, and I still get emails every once in a while from people who read it as kids and tracked me down to tell me how much they enjoyed it. But don’t take my word for it, here’s what bestselling author Cory Doctorow had to say: “An extraordinary and delightfully weird romp that’s one part China Mieville, one part Lemony Snicket, with trace amounts of Madeline L’Engle and Roald Dahl . . . Kennedy has filled 400+ pages with a series of strange turn-ups and adventures that grow progressively more outlandish and funny, such that when you think he’s surely run out of runway and must crash, he finds new, unsuspected weirdness to explore.” Yowza! Get your signed, personalized copy from the Book Cellar here.

And that’s it! Your entire holiday shopping list, taken care of! Thank me later! Or thank me when you wake up from your drugged slumber, claw your way out of your leather straps, and somehow escape the nightmarish underground maze beneath my cursed hometown!

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR, AMERICA!

It’s hard not to feel angry and demoralized at the results of this election. I do. And to once again be reminded that this country isn’t the country I hoped it was. My instinct is to freeze and go numb, so I really appreciate those who are sending out messages of hope and solidarity. And talking to people in real life has helped me too. Reminding each other that we’re not alone.