Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
A follow up, in a way, to our book of ballet stories for the same publisher. Heidi and I worked separately at first–me retelling the stories, she doing the information part. Then we each edited the other’s work. Finally we each read the entire thing for flow, discussed the problems we found, and then
Bear Outside turned out to be my first ever book with the famed editor Neal Porter and my (accidentally) 400th book. It has an interesting backstory. About five years before I wrote and sold A BEAR OUTSIDE, I had been helping one of my editors find an illustrator for a different bear book of mine.
I have always wanted to write an original board book for very young children. My agent challenged me because–so she said–I tend to be a writer of very sophisticated books. I think she saw it as a stretching exercise. So I tackled the area–in rhyme,
Georgia Pugh is my next door neighbor, a wonderful painter who has pieces in some of the finest museums in the country. I wrote the text for her, setting it in our combined front yards, with my own three children starring as two brothers and a sister on a hot, hot summer day. She painted her own
Hard- hitting political poetry for adults. Remember—-I lean left. Far left. So Trump & Co. get no kudos from me. I began writing the poems slightly before the vote, Finished it in January when it was published. Wonderful intro by Bill Newman, head of the Western Mass ACLU, a writer himself. And Civil Rights lawyer.
My editor at Little Brown, the marvelous Maria Modugno, sent me a picture by a young artist named Laurel Molk. It was a charming water color of mice dressed in Halloween costumes and playing musical instruments. “We love her work,” Maria said, “but she can’t write a story. Can you do something for
Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. In this collection of poems I got to write a bunch of strange, funny, and sentimental Halloween poems. I even got to use one I had written way back in college (the ivy climbing the wall poem.) The editor told me that Elise Primavera
My first-born granddaughter Maddison and I had written a book called “When Nana Dances With Me” when she was ten and was a young ballerina in Amherst Mass. As I had been at Balanchine’s School of American ballet in NYC years and years ago. And we loved to dance together in my kitchen.
This is a straight-forward original fairy tale in which a miller’s son, who has the gift of understanding the speech of animals, finds a bird that can speed time up or slow time down or stop time altogether. With the bird’s help, he rescues a princess from a wicked giant. Interestingly, I began writing the
Because we are a family of bird watchers, and because I have many opportunities to see my husband David (the original Pa from OWL MOON) interact with birds, children, and other birders, this book of poems came about. Some are celebratory, some are sad, some are observations. One poem