Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
This collection is entirely retold folk tales for the youngest listeners: “The Three Bears,” “The Three Little Pigs,” “The Three Billy Goats Gruff,” “The Little Red Hen,” “The Shoemaker and the Elves,” etc. There is a storytelling CD/tape narrated by me, with musical interludes by my son Adam Stemple.
This book was actually Ted Lewin’s idea. We had done two books of poetry already–“Bird Watch” and “Sea Watch”–and he wanted to do a book about the earliest ancestors of farmyard animals. He convinced Pat Gauch at Philomel to do the book and then they contacted me.
A companion to “Bird Watch,” this book of poems with marvelous Ted Lewin illustrations looks at about a dozen and a half creatures who live in the sea, from sharks and whales and otters and loggerhead turtles to small fish. It is amazing how much research
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 last 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! I picked the songs, wrote the historical notes
I am a city girl by birth, a country girl by choice. Born in New York City, I can still thrill to some things about the skyscraper life. This anthology of poems–a few by me but most by other writers–covers a lot of city living, from graffiti
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
A young editor at Scholastic, knowing that the 3,000th anniversary of Jerusalem was at hand (how do editors know these things????) asked me to write a book of poems about the City of Peace. I had visited it only once, way back in 1966,
This book is about the Sonora desert 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 the Sonoran desert section in Arizona several times, as well as deserts in Israel,
I was called by the editor at Walker who wanted a picture book on monsters. “Only if I can write it with my daughter,” I said. She was delighted and so Heidi got to work on her first book. We divided up the monsters (I got Nessie and the golem as I recall)