Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
I live in New England where there are bears, raccoons, bobcats, skunks, rabbits, deer, turkeys, bluejays, coyotes, opossum, chipmunks, squirrels—a regular Wild Animal Sow in our back yard on a regular basis. So when my oldest granddaughter who was house sitting for me one summer, sent me an email that read in part:
Retold folk and fairy tales from all over the world, reimagined for the youngest listeners.
This is another book that took about twelve years to come out. My part–the finding and retelling the stories–was done within months of signing the contract. But the wonderful Jane Dyer, the illustrator, had some health
This is a book of poems about things under the ground: moles, insects, drain pipes, pirate treasure, subways, magma pools, tree roots, etc. The poems were written over a number of years. The first illustrator (this would have been his first book) said yes, after the editor and I searched for the right
The umpty dozenth book in the series was one suggested by the editor. My mind had gone on walkabout, so we brainstormed ideas. But once I knew a direction, the rhyme began to flow. And boy was I glad it did! I remembered all those school days when friends got mad and did bad things, said bad things, and then
Stone Cold is a noir mystery set in Edinburgh, Scotland in the 1930s. My husband and I lived in Edinburgh for six months in the late
1980s and loved every moment of our time there. when I got the
initial idea for a graphic novel in which the detective was a gargoyle
Ah, The Seelie King’s War, where son Adam (my co-writer) and I untangled the history of the Seelie Court’s mysteries and the lineage of the Unseelie kings. The final book in the trilogy, where we begin with the unknowable, meet a fascinating new cast of characters, kill off quite a few beloved folk in a terrible war, and solve the biggest mystery of the The Seelie Wars trilogy.
A collection of poems based this time on nursery rhymes, in which poet Rebecca Kai Dotlich and I write poems from differing viewpoints than the originals. This follows the well received GRUMBLES FROM THE FOREST collection which did the same for fairy tales.
I had written this Little Frog book a couple of years ago, it had gotten some nice rejections, but then sold a picture book to Brian Sockin for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s new children’s line. Turns out Brian (fastest editor/publisher in the East) also had a line of non-bird books called Persnickety
After Jason and I did THE EGRET’S DAY for Boyds Mills, and with the then editor’s enthusiasm for another project, we settled on the idea of alligators as being a good follow up because Jason lives in South Carolina and already had a whole lot of alligator photos from there as well as from having been an Everglades Fellowship winner
I began this book (a tribute to a cam song I loved, “The Green Grass Grows All Around”) when I saw Bob Marstall’s latest work. Bob, an old friend of 35 plus years, had up to that time been notable for his careful, realistic landscapes and nature books. He won an Orbis Pictus award among other honors for them.