Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
So I had a brilliant idea. Humorous poems about stinky animals. Lots of back matter. You know–skunk, stink bug, mink, ferret,. Had a moment’s doubt that there wouldn’t be enough. Google set my mind at rest. Talked to daughter Heidi about doing the book with me.
Eeny and her sisters are moles, but the older two are conservative and nervous. Eeny is a young adventurer. Someone once described this book as “Beatrix Potter with a kink!” I’d tried writing this story in rhyme: “Once at the bottom of a deep, dark hole lived Eeny and Meeny and little Miney Mole.”
After the first book came out–Eeny Meeny Miney Mole from HAacourt, the company itself changed hands. Editors (including mine) left, and no one wanted the second book. But years later, (20 Years maybe?) it has found a new home. The two books are about the three mole sisters who live in a deep dark hole. I have now written a third book abut them. Hope it doesn’t take that long to get it out!
I had tried for years to write a memoir of my father’s family and their travels to America from a small shtetel (Jewish village) in the Ukraine in the early 1900s. I’d done a quasi first chapter, written a children’s book that fictionalized one of the funniest of our family stories—called And Twelve Chinese Acrobats.
This book has only 22 words in the text, and more than half of them are made up! (There is a backmatter which accounts for many more words.) My husband is the one who counted the words and told me!! And I adore the paintings that look like old circus posters. It took the editor and art director more than a year to find exactly the right illustrator.
This alphabet book stars elves doing a variety of activities. Illustrator Lauren Mills was one of my students at Centrum and I always loved her perfect miniaturist style. When she moved from California east and married Dennis Nolan, another wonderful illustrator, I wrote this book just for her.
I was in the doctor’s office years ago, waiting for him to come into the room, and reading the Smithsonian Magazine. In it was a story about East Coast women who moved west to live to the Nebraska territory. Often these women went crazy because there were no identifiable sounds there. It was
It is no secret that I am a huge Emily Dickinson fan. I already published THE EMILY SONNETS (Creative Editions), MY UNCLE EMILY (Philome Booksl) and loads of poetry about her and a short story which won the Nebula for short stories, “Sister Emily’s Lightship”. (Tor). However, This is the first time my plot revolved around Emily as a child.
This story about a Chinese emperor who is saved by his youngest and most insignificant daughter won a Caldecott Honor Book in 1968 for illustrator Ed Young. It was the first of three books that I have done with him. (The others: Seventh Mandarin and The Girl Who Loved the Wind.) He used a
This is the story of Columbus’ landing in the Americas, as told by a boy of the Taino people who already lived there. The 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage was coming up, and my Harcourt editor of the time–Bonnie Ingber–suggested such a book was needed. I thought a Taino should write it.