Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
This book was meant to be a companion to our successful COLOR ME A RHYME, but I consciously decided to make the poems simpler and to concentrate on rhyming poems since counting books are for the quite young. Along the way, Jason found some wonderful shots for the early
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
In January, 2002, after he endured months of pain, an MRI showed a cancerous tumor in my husband’s skull. In March radiation therapy was started. The time from discovery to treatment was an eternity for us. An eternity. With that metaphor I
I love working with my son Jason on books. His photos are so strong, so powerful, that their very existence pushes me to write poems to match them. When we were completing COLOR ME A RHYME, and my husband and I were
My family watches birds. It all began with my husband David, who is the original of Pa in OWL MOON. So when our youngest son Jason began his career as a nature photographer, bird pictures were part of his vast repertoire. So why has it taken
My daughter, Heidi, and I have always sent each other notes — sometimes quick little memos left on a pillow or inside a journal, or letters and postcards sent through the mail. Now that there is
It took about eight months to track down the lullaby rhymes for this picture book. Some I got from books, others from my husband’s graduate students and international colleagues. I wanted the rhymes in
I was helping Jason sort and file his slides at his house in Colorado one visit, and realized what astonishing shots he had of single colors in nature–yellow flowers, brown wrinkled sand, punky pink thistles, etc.
When Jason showed me some of the pictures of ice he’d taken–especially the one that looks just like Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream,” I knew what our follow up poetry book to “Water Music” had to be. Originally I called the book “Ice Song”
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.