Picture Book

I began this years and years ago, with a young illustrator, and it was a watermelon baby. But she disappeared from the scene. About fifteen years later, I rewrote it entirely and finally found the perfect editor in a Canadian publisher for the book. She found

When going through Jason’s backlog of photographs—never an onerous task but rather a real joy—I realized how many pictures of animals and birds reflected in water that he had. Almost enough for a book. So I wrote some poems for the best of the pictures and started trying to sell it. Boyds

I have loved Emily Dickinson’s poetry (and her life story) for as long as I can remember. My husband and I moved to the Connecticut River Valley near Amherst where Dickinson had lived all her life, first to Conway in the mid ’60s where we our first

At first the editor, Pat Gauch, and I were talking about a book simply relating the building of the Statue of Liberty, a new project for Jim Burke with whom I had done the successful My Brother’s Flying Machine. However, as I began my research, I found too many other picture books-some quite wonderful

This book began as a shorter poem, “Mama’s Kisses,” published in Nick Jr. Magazine in 2002. And then I expanded it into a picture book, rewrote it a dozen or more times for myself and then the editor. That’s how it goes!

The idea for this book came from the Scholastic booksellers, and boy! were they right. I wrote it remembering my son Adam going to school, and my grandson (Adam’s son), and all the trouble they got into being boisterous, and mouthy, and smart. No one should break boisterous little boys of their