Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
My grandmother, Fanny Berlin, lived in Hampton Roads, Virginia. Every evening she took a long walk around the block. She was the inspiration for this book that is about a black child and an old white lady who tells stories to her as they walk. Cooper’s paintings are sensuous stories on their own.
It took Heidi and me close to fifteen years till this book finally came out. I tried it as a picture book, a middle grade novel, an easy-reader. When Heidi signed on and we did it together as a picture book (MUCH better than my first feeble attempt) we actually had a book. Scholastic bought it and put the very inventive John McKinley
This was the second collection of fairy tales I wrote and together with The Girl Who Cried Flowers and The Hundredth Dove led to my being called the Hans Christian Andersen of America. Putting the stories in a single volume was the idea of my astute and wonderful editor Ann K. Beneduce, and she had a hand in all my fairy tales for many years after.
Both my boys played Little League and were fine players. But my heart always went out to the whiffers, the kids who just couldn’t play very well. Everyone–even their own parents–seemed to be down on them. So this
This collection, subtitled “Poems of Our Planet,” is a sweeping anthology of forty ecologically sensitive poems from such poets as C. S. Lewis, Carl Sandberg, Joseph Langland, Ogden Nash, W. S. Merwin, N. Scott Momaday, Denise Levertov and others.
The first of four music books I did for Boyds Mills. Adam was wonderful to work with, shipping me off the simple arrangements which I then played on the piano. We figured if I could sight read them, ANYONE could! Many were Mother Goose songs I’d taught him when he was a child. I picked the songs, wrote the historical notes.
I was challenged by an editor to write a repetitive nursery rhyme. So I began it “Mouse’s house is very small, very small, very small. Hardly any room at all for anyone but mouse.” And then the editor turned the book down. So I turned around and sold it to my wonderful editor at Putnam
This midrash was a delight for a wife and mother of bird watchers to write. It is a kind of poem, which you will notice if you read it out loud. The pictures are just stunning. Midrash is what the rabbis do by taking a story from the Hebrew Bible and finding new ways to interpret them.
A retelling of the famous old German (Grimms) story, this was published as a pair with “Little Mouse & Elephant.” It was an ABA Pick of the List book and a Parent’s Magazine Best Book.
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.”