Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
This How Do Dinos book was the editor’s idea, but I took to it with gusto–as did illustrator Mark Teague. How many times have those of us with children (or who are next door to neighbors’ children) seen toddlers through five-year-olds have massive meltdowns? All of us! And who could
My third book of adult poetry, first book of political poems, for the wonderful small poetry press Holy!Cow. I was hitting the right wing hard here, in a variety of poems, and developed a style for what I would later use in the poetry book I began in 2016 right before the traitorous Trump won” Before the Vote/After.
Yes, they are back. I gave the editor a whole raft of choices—eating monsters, monsters taking a bath, going to camp, and she said. “What about sports?” I wrote it and wanted to call it “Warty Monsters, Sporty Monsters,” but cooler heads (the editor’s) prevailed
My son Adam and I had begun a possible series/trilogy, got as far as a shaky first chapter and an even shakier proposal, and put it aside for stuff that was working better for us. And about five years later, editor Sharyn November asked me if I was interested in doing a middle grade fantasy
Over a period of seven years, I wrote a sonnet a year about the life of my favorite poet (and neighbor!) Emily Dickinson. Not looking to get them published, not at first. Just writing them. They certainly didn’t seem to me to be something either an adult poetry publisher would want or something
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.
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: