Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
I had done a picture book years ago for Harcourt–long out of print–called THE LAPTIME SONG AND PLAY BOOK and knew there were many many more lap games then the ones I’d used for that 32 page picture book. (One song or play game per double page makes for a fairly limited selection.) So when Liz Bicknell,
This short novel has a long and complicated history. My agent was phoned by an editor at Scholastic wanting to know if I had any interest in a new series they were starting called HORRORS! It was to be novels based on old fairy tales brought up to date, with a frisson of terror
This is another long story. After having done a bunch of music books with my son Adam in the 80s and 90s, I made a list of other possible interesting collections, and Work Songs was high up on that list. I sent the ideas around to many of my publishers
Book 3 of the Stuart Quartet is about Bonnie Prince Charlie and the disastrous battle of Culloden that broke the Scottish clan system and saw the English banning the playing of bagpipes, the speaking of Scots Gaelic, and wearing tartan and kilts.
For the fourth (and alas final) Young Heroes book, Bob and I decided on Jason because the old tales tell about how he was raised on a mountain by the kindly centaur, Chiron.
After having done WILD WINGS with Jason’s bird photographs–which won a National Wild Life Book award–I realized that he still had many gorgeous bird photos left over. Not only that, each time I went to South Carolina to visit (his baby twins, not Jason and his
So there I was, walking around the halls of the International Reading Assn conference, and I stopped at the small but elegant display of Barefoot Books. I was immediately struck by their distinctive style. One in particular was The Barefoot Book of Opera Stories.
After Shulamith Oppenheim and I handed in the manuscript for the adult folklore collection, THE FISH PRINCE & OTHER MERMEN STORIES, the editor called us up. He thought that there was actually a wonderful picture book that could come out of the collection, and he had
LEAST THINGS began when I read the quote, “Nature excels in her least things.” I told my photographer son Jason and he began taking photos of nature’s smallest things–jingle shells, tiny crabs, butterflies, bees, hummingbirds, etc. Slowly he gathered his photographs
This third book in our Young Heroes series began with my vision of a girl and a bear roaming the woods together. In the old stories about Atalanta it was said that as an infant she’d been set out on a hillside to die, and was discovered and nursed by a bear.