The Book Club for Kids, a podcast where middle school readers discuss well-known books, gives children the mic. Host and executive producer Kitty Felde, who’s also the founder of independent Chesapeake Press, coordinates with schools, libraries, and book festivals to choose titles and meet participants. With an estimated two million downloads and 160 books since its launch in 2015, the Book Club for Kids connects authors and their audiences.
“When adults review a book, that helps an adult find a book, but it doesn’t make a kid want to read that book,” Felde told PW. “I’ve had kids reach out to me and say, ‘We want to do a podcast with you.’ They have a particular book they fell in love with, and they can’t find places to talk about it.”
Ten years ago, Felde came to a crossroads in her career as a public radio journalist. She’d long been a reporter in Southern California and Washington, D.C., and when her station closed her Capitol Hill news bureau, she wanted a fresh start. “As I tell people, I flunked retirement,” Felde said, and she remembered how, during her time on an afternoon talk show in L.A., she used to host book discussions with young readers. “Once a month, we would invite kids, grades five to seven, who would pick a middle grade novel and chat about it,” Felde said. “When I asked myself what I enjoyed the most, it was those sessions talking to kids about books.”
For Felde, late elementary through middle school readers felt like the ideal podcast companions. “I believe that inside all of us, we are a certain age, and I’m a fifth grader, I just am,” Felde said. “Those are my people. By fifth grade, kids have a sense of their place in the world and who they are, and they have very strong opinions and great ideas, if only you will listen.”
She began contacting colleagues and interviewees from her decades on the radio, from fellow journalists to politicians to voice and screen actors. She planned each episode around a visit with the author, plus a celebrity guest reading from the selected book. Librarians and children recommended titles, and educators and parents identified kids who were eager to talk about books. At the conclusion of every podcast, she’d ask kids, authors, and guests to share their favorite title.
For the debut episode, three children read Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, and D.C. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton was the celebrity guest. Later that year, two readers met Newbery Medalist Meg Medina to discuss Medina’s Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, and National Public Radio correspondent Mandalit Del Barco read aloud from the book. In 2020, three girls read Angie Thomas’s On the Come Up, and Thomas shared a 40-song playlist that she listened to on breaks between writing sessions.
Felde starts each Book Club episode by prompting readers to discuss a novel’s plot and characters, then sees where the conversation goes. “We talked about A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but we ended up talking about #MeToo,” she recalled. “We read The Crossover, and the kids started talking about their own relationships with their parents. Magic stuff happens when you listen to what they have to say.”
Episodes and participation are free of charge, and Felde wants to recruit participants for future club meetings. “We love to tape Book Club for Kids episodes in schools, libraries, and bookstores in person in Southern California and the D.M.V. [D.C., Maryland, and Virginia],” Felde said. She meets families and educators at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books and the L.A. Maker Faire, and she stays in touch with D.C. public schools and friends in the eastern U.S. “It takes a long time to build those relationships” with schools and libraries, she said, adding that “kids’ reading levels are so far behind, and teachers and librarians are so overworked,” that it’s been hard to arrange Book Club episodes.
In addition to the Book Club for Kids, Felde founded Chesapeake Press to publish fiction and nonfiction about civics, under the ambitious motto “Saving American Democracy: One Kid at a Time.” She began Chesapeake as a venue for her self-published Fina Mendoza Mysteries, about a 10-year-old whose father is a U.S. congressman. The first two Fina Mendoza books are also available as podcasts; a Spanish-language version of the third, translated by Jorge Flores Gonzalez, pubs in 2026; and the fourth installation, Home of the Brave, pubs in summer 2026 and addresses present-day issues including California wildfires and homelessness.
Chesapeake also is open to submissions of K–8 nonfiction. Felde aspires to publish a series of biographies, and forthcoming books include a middle grade nonfiction title by Phyllis Haensel, Black and White: The Story of Civil Rights in America (fall 2026), and a picture book by Jennifer Blanck, with illustrations by Mark Wilson, A–B–C–Democracy (fall 2027).
She’s open to making more book-and-podcast combos, too, such as Losing Is Democratic: How to Talk to Kids About January 6, which includes a civics curriculum for third through fifth grade. Losing Is Democratic “came about because of my relationship with Book Club” during the 2021 Capitol riot, Felde said. “I had relationships with teachers who were working on the Hill, and I asked them the next week, ‘What did you do? You’ve got kids in those rooms whose parents were in the building.’ What they told me is what ended up in the book and podcast, putting it in a historical context and talking about the concept of losing itself.”
For Felde, everything comes back to making space for young readers’ voices, interests, and education. A decade into her multiple ventures, she’s still looking for ways that children can choose Book Club for Kids titles and suggest material for Chesapeake Press to publish. “It’s not the Big Five; we don’t do that,” she said. “But I try to put the power back in the hands of the kids.”
