Western New York Children's Book Expo

About Us:

The WNY Children’s Book Expo (WNYCBE) was founded by Kim Krug and Kathleen Skoog, owners of Monkey See, Monkey Do...Children’s Bookstore. Seed money for the expo came from a generous grant awarded Kim and Kathleen by internationally acclaimed author, James Patterson. With the grant, their expansive vision for a children's book expo began to take shape, and became reality in 2015. Since then, their expo has expanded to a full week of literary experiences for kids.

Now WNYCBE is composed of two large parts: the first is KidsLit Week, 6 days of school and community visits by authors brought to Buffalo exclusively for this event. Part two, is EXPO Saturday, an event filled with activities that give students pre-K through middle grades extraordinary opportunities to interact with the work and personalities of 40 authors and illustrators visiting here from around the globe.

To our knowledge, WNYCBE is the ONLY children's book event in the USA that celebrates childhood literacy by combining both school author visits (KidsLit Week) as well as a one-day exposition-type event. Last year, authors made 150 presentations at 46 WNY schools and touched 23,000 lives through school visits, screened presentations and those attending EXPO Saturday.

Our ambitions and scope are large, but we are not in this alone. The broad outreach of WNYCBE is made possible by our generous contributors, particularly our presenting sponsor BlueCross and BlueShield of WNY, and our collaborators since 2016, Read to Succeed Buffalo. We are most proud to be also partnering this year with Medaille College. Medaille’s administration, faculty, staff and student body are significantly contributing to administrative, creative, organizational and community outreach components of WNYCBE. Each year, we grow in numbers of generous sponsors, participating schools, dedicated volunteers and community assets. We expect that growth to continue to put Buffalo at the forefront of creative ways to encourage kids to read and to fearlessly explore the world.