Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
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.
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.
Several years ago, my daughter Heidi and I published a book called FAIRY TALE FEASTS. She is a great cook and I am a pretty good reteller of folk tales. The book became successful and iconic which means it sold enough copies to make everyone happy, and no one else had done anything like it in the field.
How Do Dinosaurs Say Happy Chanukah and How Do Dinosaurs Say Merry Christmas were featured in USA Today on Thursday, November 29 in a holiday round-up:
How Do Dinosaurs Say Happy Chanukah and How Do Dinosaurs Say Merry Christmas were featured in USA Today on Thursday, November 29 in a holiday round-up:
After doing the monster books, and the How Do Dinosaur books, I decided to try the same kind of simply rhymes with humor on dragons. This one is the first of what I hope will be a series. I adore Anderson’s cheery pictures.
My son Adam Stemple and I had written two “Rock and Roll Fairytales” for Tor books—Pay the Piper and Troll Bridge. But when our old editor left, the new one could not push through the third book, B.U.G. which was already mostly written. It’s about a Jewish kid, Sammy, who is being badly bullied in school so he makes a golem
This book began with three of my published short stories: “The Thirteenth Fey,” “The Uncorking of Uncle Finn,” and “Dusty Loves.” Though in the end only the first story was used as a basis for the book. I’d shown several of my published stories to my new editor Jill Santopolo
I was on the phone with my editor talking about a follow-up book to Sea Queens which had just come out. Somehow we got on the subject of bad girl shoes, you know—high, high heels in wicked colors, or patterns, black boots with high heels
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