Rebecca Kai Dotlich and I wanted to write a book of poems together. We tried several ideas, but the one that seemed to catch fire—and catch the eye of an editor was a book of fairy tale poems each fairy tale with a poem by each of us.
Wee Rhymes
The then head of Simon & Schuster’s children’s book trade department, and my old friend, Rubin Pfeffer came to my house to visit with me and my very ill husband, David. The three of us told stories, laughed, lifted the spirits of everyone in the room.
Ekaterinoslav: A Family’s Passage to America
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.
Last Laughs
Before he became Children’s Poet Laureate, Pat Lewis and I had sold several other poetry collections together–Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers, the Life of Chagall in Verse, came out first. Then Take Two, our book of twin poems. (He’s a twin, I am grandmother of twins.) The third book we sold was
The Last Selchie Child
The Last Selchie Child started with a bunch of my fantasy/fairy tale poems that had been individually published but never all collected in a book. I thought about a book of them for some time. Many were not appropriate for young children because they often touch on some sexual element in the
Take Two
This book began when Pat Lewis and I talked about a possible book together. He is a twin and I have twin granddaughters and twin aunts and twin brothers-in-law, so we began writing poems back and forth to one another. Along the way, Pat became the third Children’s Poet Laureate in
Things to Say to a Dead Man
During the time that my husband’s cancer returned (see The Radiation Sonnets), though his death, and up to five years later, I wrote poetry. Some of it was to keep me sane. Some of it was to record what happened and how it affected me. And some was in the hopes that what I wrote might go out there and help others.
Birds of a Feather
More bird poems, all of them written to respond to Jason’s brilliant photographs, and with an introduction/appreciation by the world’s greatest birdsong expert, Don Kroodsma. These books are always a labor of love, mainly because I think the photographs should be seen by everyone.
Switching on the Moon
I don’t actually remember how this book started. Either the editor suggested it or Andy Fusek Peters did. The only thing I know is that we all wanted a companion book to HERE’S A LITTLE POEM which had gotten sterling reviews, won some awards, and looked to become a minor childhood classic.
Here’s a Little Poem
Andrew Fusek Peters of Shropshire, England, the well-known young (but VERY tall) British poet for children, emailed me and asked if I would be interested in working on an anthology of poems about a child’s day with him. He would choose the British poets and me the Americans. He’d already