Top Authors Join Forces To Help Refugees

What do the authors of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, The Princess Diaries, the mega-bestsellers Goosebumps (350 million+ sold) and The Baby-sitters Club (175 million+ sold), the Newbery medal-winning Dicey's Song and Out of The Dust, and the National Book Award-winning them have in common?

They are among the incredible contributors to our new book, What You Wish For: A Book For Darfur! I am thrilled to share with you the exciting news about the book, and hope you will help us in a very specific way to make it a huge success. Working with the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, we will be using 100% of our proceeds to fund libraries for the 250,000 Darfuris living in refugee camps in eastern Chad.

What You Wish For: A Book For Darfur features stories and poems about wishes by some of the top talent writing for children and young adults: Alexander McCall Smith, Meg Cabot, R.L. Stine, Ann M. Martin, Cynthia Voigt, Karen Hesse, Joyce Carol Oates, Cornelia Funke, Nikki Giovanni, John Green, Nate Powell, Gary Soto, Jeanne DuPrau, Francisco X. Stork, Marilyn Nelson, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sofia Quintero, and Jane Yolen. All have contributed their writing for free to support this cause. Advocate, actress, and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Mia Farrow has written a moving Foreword based on her 13 visits to Darfur and Chad, and we are honored to include a statement by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres.

All that the book is missing right now is you. We will be printing the names of 1,000 supporters in the book, and I hope you will strongly consider being one of them and helping to tell as many people as possible about this opportunity. By donating $20 at this link, you can get your name or your child's included (a great gift for young fans of these authors). If you are concerned about privacy, but want to support the cause, we can print your last initial instead of your last name, S. instead of Smith. We need to receive your names by April 30 in order to make our publisher's deadline.

If you know anyone who loves to read, is a fan of one of our authors, or is an activist concerned about the refugees, please share this news. Just direct them to bookwish.org -- email it, tweet it, put it on your Facebook page. With your help, we can assemble the 1,000 supporters and not only fund this important aid for the refugees, but also show everyone who picks up the book just how strongly people still care about Darfur. It has been eight years, but the refugees are still in the camps and still need books for their education and mental health. This is an easy way to help, with the rare opportunity to be part of a book by such phenomenal authors.

What You Wish For: A Book For Darfur will be released in September by Penguin's imprint G.P. Putnam's Sons. You can already pre-order online, and one socially-conscious bookseller, BetterWorldBooks, has pledged to donate 100% of its net profits from the book's sales, increasing how much we earn for the refugees.

If you have any questions about the book, or ideas or contacts for publicity, please contact us. Thank you for your continued support. We have been working on this book for two years behind the scenes, and we are so excited to finally share it with you.