Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
The Dinosaur books keep on rolling along. This was one of two board books I wrote at the same time, and Mark did a wonderfully compressed version of the bouncy, adorable dinos for it. In record time, I might add. The book was ready long before the contract!
After Shulamith Oppenheim and I handed in the manuscript for the adult folklore collection, THE FISH PRINCE & OTHER MERMEN STORIES, the editor called us up. He thought that there was actually a wonderful picture book that could come out of the collection, and he had
LEAST THINGS began when I read the quote, “Nature excels in her least things.” I told my photographer son Jason and he began taking photos of nature’s smallest things–jingle shells, tiny crabs, butterflies, bees, hummingbirds, etc. Slowly he gathered his photographs
The first dinosaur book did so well (that’s putting it mildly!) my editor asked if I thought I could come up with a sequel. Could I? You bet. About that time, various grandchildren had the sniffles, the snuffles, and the all-around gollywoogles, so a book about dinosaurs in
So many people wrote to me asking that I write a book for boys to pair with my collection Not One Damsel in Distress: Folk Tales for Strong Young Women, that I decided to try it.
With the upcoming Wright Brothers anniversary, every publisher in the world was planning a book about them. One of my editors (a favorite) called and asked me to do a picture book about the dynamic duo. I said, “Not unless I can find a new way into the story.”
I worked on this book for years. Beginning with a short story called, The Sword and the Stone, published in my collection MERLIN’S BOOKE, I noodled away at it (that’s a technical term!) a little bit each year. Finally I sent five chapters to my editor and
This third book in our Young Heroes series began with my vision of a girl and a bear roaming the woods together. In the old stories about Atalanta it was said that as an infant she’d been set out on a hillside to die, and was discovered and nursed by a bear.
In January, 2002, after he endured months of pain, an MRI showed a cancerous tumor in my husband’s skull. In March radiation therapy was started. The time from discovery to treatment was an eternity for us. An eternity. With that metaphor I
HOPTOAD is one of the shortest picture books (if not the shortest) I have ever written.But the pictures by Karen Schmidt give it a longer story. The piece began as a silly rhyme which I thought might be a board book, but my editor had broader (wider?) thoughts and so it became a picture book.