Short Takes

Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, has its first children's library, thanks to Yohannes Gebregeorgis, who left his country while it was warring with neighboring Eritrea. Armed with an MLS from the University of Texas in Austin and experience as a children's librarian at the San Francisco Public Library, Gebregeorgis returned home last year to start his own library, with the help of children's author Jane Kurtz. The library, which is solely funded by donations, has 15,000 books and serves close to 2,000 kids from 17 schools.

Scholastic Book Fairs is giving kids another chance to become published writers through its second "Kids Are Authors" competition. Last year a first-grade class from California and a fourth-grade class from Connecticut wrote and illustrated their own books, which were later published by Scholastic. For more information on how to enter, visit www.scholastic.com/kidsareauthors. The deadline for the competition is March 15, 2004.