Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
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
So the wonderful editor of the Scholastic novelty books, Jeff Salane, and I were having lunch in the Scholastic cafeteria, and we were looking for new How Do Dinosaurs novelty projects to complement the regular books. Having just finished a cook book with my wonderful daughter Heidi (taste-testing recipes can put
Bug Off, our latest book of nature poems, is all about insects, bugs, creepy crawlies. And like the other books I have done with Jason (my youngest son, an award-winning photographer), it begins with his photographs. I noticed he already had a lot of pictures of bugs–a praying mantis, butterflies,
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
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