Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
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”
My grandmother, Fanny Berlin, lived in Hampton Roads, Virginia. Every evening she took a long walk around the block. She was the inspiration for this book that is about a black child and an old white lady who tells stories to her as they walk. Cooper’s paintings are sensuous stories on their own.
A tone poem about a boy going to bed which I wrote for artist Anne Hunter after seeing her portfolio. I call this my homage to Dylan Thomas, because of the sensuous wordplay in the text. To make up the word “hullaballooning” it took me well over a week. Poems are like that.
This collection is entirely retold folk tales for the youngest listeners: “The Three Bears,” “The Three Little Pigs,” “The Three Billy Goats Gruff,” “The Little Red Hen,” “The Shoemaker and the Elves,” etc. There is a storytelling CD/tape narrated by me, with musical interludes by my son Adam Stemple.
welve of my stories, several of them brand new, all with a fantasy or science fictional basis. “Lost Girls,” the story that closes the volume, won the 1998 Nebula award for best novelette of the year. I believe that was the first time a children’s story won that coveted award.
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.
A companion to “Bird Watch,” this book of poems with marvelous Ted Lewin illustrations looks at about a dozen and a half creatures who live in the sea, from sharks and whales and otters and loggerhead turtles to small fish. It is amazing how much research
This collection, subtitled “Poems of Our Planet,” is a sweeping anthology of forty ecologically sensitive poems from such poets as C. S. Lewis, Carl Sandberg, Joseph Langland, Ogden Nash, W. S. Merwin, N. Scott Momaday, Denise Levertov and others.
The last of four music books I did for Boyds Mills. Adam was wonderful to work with, shipping me off the simple arrangements which I then played on the piano. We figured if I could sight read them, ANYONE could! I picked the songs, wrote the historical notes
The second book of the Young Merlin trilogy (PASSAGER and MERLIN are the others), this tells the story of Merlin as a twelve year old who has lived for four years in the falconer’s home until a devastating fire sends him on his way into an