Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
I am a cat person. My husband is a dog person. We’ve owned both and so these poems are from experience! And no–there is no mistake. Half the book is upside down so you can start from either end, depending upon whether you prefer cats or dogs. Janet Street’s uproarious pictures are right on beat!
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
Four linked poems about the seasons from the point of view of four different animals: winter is the weasel, who wears the season on his hide; spring is the spring peeper, a frog who believes he causes the season to appear by singing; summer is the dragonfly with wings like stained glass;
A book about the history and mystery of bells, bell ringing, and bell making. As I say in the book: “Where men and their civilizations have flourished, bells flourished, their voices touching all fields of human endeavor.” Well, it was the 1970s and I wasn’t sufficiently smart enough to include women in
Published simultaneously in hardcover and paperback, this was the second (and alas, last) in the series of science fiction mysteries. I actually had written a lot of the third book when this particular line of Knopf books was declared dead. That’s publishing for you.
This science fictional mystery was meant to be the beginning of a series. First publication was in a short-lived Random House book club edition illustrated by Deeter, then simultaneous hard/soft from Knopf with illustrator Obrist. I know that’s confusing. At least it confused me!
Yes, they are back. I gave the editor a whole raft of choices—eating monsters, monsters taking a bath, going to camp, and she said. “What about sports?” I wrote it and wanted to call it “Warty Monsters, Sporty Monsters,” but cooler heads (the editor’s) prevailed
This mammoth collection was my second song book. Babbie Green is a good friend and professional musician. (Her father was Johnny Green, a Hollywood composer and arranger.) We had a ball working on this. I picked all the songs, found the written music or sung it into a tape recorder and then
So, David L. Harrison was posting on his personal web page about how when his son (now in his 60s I believe) was a boy, David had always promised to write him a story about a lonely tiger, but never did. And so I wrote back (also on David’s site) the beginning of the story set in India and after we had this open to the public several pages going on, I said: “Think it’s time to take this offline and really go for it.”
I was asked to write a book of poems about the sacred places around the world. Frankly, I didn’t think it would work, but I couldn’t help trying. It meant reading about twenty different religions and finding a particular sacred place to represent each