Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
Bug Off, our latest book of nature poems, is all about insects, bugs, creepy crawlies. And like the other books I have done with Jason (my youngest son, an award-winning photographer), it begins with his photographs. I noticed he already had a lot of pictures of bugs–a praying mantis, butterflies,
The Last Selchie Child started with a bunch of my fantasy/fairy tale poems that had been individually published but never all collected in a book. I thought about a book of them for some time. Many were not appropriate for young children because they often touch on some sexual element in the
This book began when Pat Lewis and I talked about a possible book together. He is a twin and I have twin granddaughters and twin aunts and twin brothers-in-law, so we began writing poems back and forth to one another. Along the way, Pat became the third Children’s Poet Laureate in
During the time that my husband’s cancer returned (see The Radiation Sonnets), though his death, and up to five years later, I wrote poetry. Some of it was to keep me sane. Some of it was to record what happened and how it affected me. And some was in the hopes that what I wrote might go out there and help others.
I have always loved Chagall’s bizarre, colorful flying-in-the-sky-fiddler’s-on-the-roof pictures. And so when Pat Lewis (now Children’s Poet Laureate of America) and I started talking about doing some books of poetry together, I offerred Chagall and his action-packed life to Pat as a prospect. We had
Back before 2000, I wrote a short story of the same name and it was published by anthologists Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow. The story was about five pages long, a West Virginia take on Snow White. It was always a story I thought could be expanded into a novel one day.
Every dino has a birthday!
Editor Bonnie and I came up with the birthday idea more or less at the same time. But I struggled with it for several years, kept putting it aside and bringing it out again. Nothing rhymed with party (except farty and smarty) or birthday. It was a good idea with a decided lack of easy …
One of my favorite Scandanavian folk tales is “The Cat of the Dovrfell” and when Linda Graves, a member of WMIG, the Western Massachusetts Illustrators’ (which I’d started years ago) showed a folktale picture of a Finnish/Danish girl in full costume with a white bear cub at one of our meetings, I found my inspiriation for this retelling.
If some of you think the basic plot of this graphic novel (my second graphic novel ever—and how I love the form!) sounds familiar, give yourselves an A+. It is based on, expanded from my novella, “Dragonfield” first published in 1985 in my collection of the same name.