Island Readers & Writers was honored to be selected as one of five sites nationwide for National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Mac Barnett’s 2026 tour.

We had the opportunity to host two public events with Mac at the beautiful Jesup Library, as well as take him on a school visit to Milbridge Elementary School. First, we spent time in school assemblies, asking Mac lots of questions about his books and work. Afterward, we visited ELA teacher Everett Carroll’s classroom, where his sixth graders had the opportunity to show off their writing and spend time with Mac to ask him questions…some silliness and tall tales included!

What’s your favorite part about being an author?

I started writing kids books because I like reading stories out loud to kids. So when I get to do stuff like we did today, that’s my favorite. I love books, I love making books, I love being a writer, but I do find writing to be really hard work.

A lot of everyday writing is sitting down trying to come up with a story, then making it better. I get stuck, I get frustrated, I’ll get mad at myself. It’s like it’s a mix of good feelings and hard feelings when I am actually working on a story. Then, when I’m done and I get to read it out loud, that is just the best feeling.

How are you liking your first trip to our school?

I visit a lot of schools, not just the ones that I visit as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. And the questions that you were asking in assembly today, the work that I saw out on the tables—which, I loved each one of your books —is admirable. You’ve been asking very writerly questions today, and I think that the way that you are talking and thinking about books and making stories in your school is very cool.

How did you come up with the idea for Counting Monkeys?

Sometimes I really get inspired by other genres or other kinds of books, so I thought it’d be fun to mess around with a counting book. It’s kind of like how Guess Again that I read to you [during the assembly] is messing around with the format of a guessing book. There are certain kinds of books that really only exist in picture books, and a counting book is one of those things. We have a lot of counting books about animals and I thought it would be fun to just sort of mess with it!

So…how did you become a kid spy?

(For those who aren’t familiar, Mac’s illustrated adventure series, Mac B. Kid Spy, details his time as a kid spy for the Queen of England.)

(For those who aren’t familiar, Mac’s illustrated adventure series, Mac B. Kid Spy, details his time as a kid spy for the Queen of England.)

Well, I sort of get into this in Chapter One of Mac B., Kid Spy: Mac Undercover. I was kind of confused about becoming a kid spy too, because I grew up in California, so it was very strange that the Queen of England just called me out of nowhere and was like, [English accent] “Mac, would you be a spy for me?” I was like, “Why, I’m just a kid in California?”

But you know, she was like, “Well, you have really good grades.” I was like, “Wow, I didn’t know you were reading my report card.”

But here’s a crazy thing that I didn’t put in there. So the Queen of England called me, right? I didn’t put this in there because I didn’t want to embarrass her, but she called me collect.

Wait, what’s that?

Okay, you guys don’t know what this means but, the way it used to work is you would call somebody, but if you called them collect, they would have to pay for the phone call. And it was really expensive in the 1980s to have a phone call from California to England. I didn’t find out until later when my mom was going over the phone bill and said, “Why do we have all of these charges for these collect calls from England?”

This was crazy because the Queen of England, I mean, she was one of the richest people in the entire world, and then she was making other people pay for her phone calls! I thought that was pretty outrageous. Now I’ve met some other super rich people, and that’s kind of what they’re like sometimes. At the time I could not believe it, but again, I didn’t embarrass her, that story is just for us.

[And the readers of IRW’s blog, as it turns out.]

 

How long were you a spy for?

From the ages of 7–8. So I retired at age 8.

That’s a good span.

Yeah, I think so. I mean, it’s a hard life, you can’t do it very long.

Did your friends know you were a spy?!

I didn’t tell them, they just thought that I got a lot of ear infections. Which, well, I did get a lot of ear infections.

 

 

Photo credits: Katherine Emery, 2026.