Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
Retellings of classic folk stories about fairies–from Scotland, Wales, Ireland, England, Brittany, Persia, South Africa etc. I had long wanted to do such a volume, and had presented the idea to many editors, but was always turned down. Then after I’d done the
An anthology of folk tales in which the heroes are all older or elderly. My contribution to the AARP set. (Of which I am a member in good standing.) I was surprised that there had never been any such volume before. A long
This book began first as a script for a short animated film. Only five years later did it finally become a book. Part of my Arthurian obsession (I have written a number of books about King Arthur, though this is the only
Jason lives in Colorado where it snows a lot. So he has taken a lot of stunning pictures of snow over the years. I culled these, chose about fifteen for writing poems about, and then other photos that I loved but couldn’t
I hadn’t planned to write a third book of the Dales, after Sister Light and White Jenna. In fact, I killed off all the main characters in White Jenna so I wouldn’t have to write a trilogy. But there was this nagging question in my
We live in a small New England town in western Massachusetts. When we moved in, the Town Clerk gave us an old black and white photo of our house from the 1910s. It was by the Howes Brothers, turn of the century
My old college, Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, contacted me and asked if I would write a picture book about the founder for the Sophia Smith Centennial, I explained how long picture books actually take, which
Eight new stories about Robin Hood and company, by such worthies as Nancy Springer, Anna Kirwan, Mary Frances Zambreno. It also includes son Adam Stemple’s first solo short story. My story is called “Our Lady of the
This book is about the Arctic in occasional rhyme, part of a series of four Welcome To … books. It takes a lot of research to write a poem about a place. I have been to Alaska three times but I’ve never seen a polar bear.
A long time ago, my editor at Little Brown sent me someone’s art work asking me to write a book about barns for that artist. I couldn’t. But one day I thought about the barn-raising scene in the movie “Witness” and