There’s a terrific exhibit of Andrew Glass’s illustrations for Moby Dick at the Danforth Museum and School of Art in Framingham, Massachusetts. Here’s a link to an article about it. Click HERE. The best part is reading the children’s reactions. “They try to catch this big whale but never do.” Hannah says, “Whales don’t eat [...]
This was an exciting week. Little Red Hot was officially published last Monday. All sorts of good things have happened since then. Amazon had an online special featuring Little Red Hot and my other Amazon books. That should result in a few sales, considering that Amazon promotions go out all over the world. Our local [...]
Look at this! I’m amazed. My friend Natalie Franklin created an Anansi quilt to go with my Anansi stories. I hope you can enlarge the jpeg. The detail is stunning. As I told Natalie, it probably took longer for her to create the quilt than for me to write the books. For those who’d like [...]
The Next Big Thing is an author blog tour. What’s a blog tour? A blog tour gives those on the tour a chance to meet different authors by way of their blogs. The Next Big Thing began in Australia. Each week a different author answers specific questions about his or her upcoming book. The answers [...]
In a few days a new year will arrive. Time to look back over the old one. What kind of year has 2012 been? It’s hard to say. The pluses came with minuses and the minuses came with pluses. A lot of fine things happened with my writing. The Golem’s Latkes won a National Jewish [...]
I don’t know how the ALA is going to award the Caldecott this year, given the precipitous decline in the picture book market. Several editors have told me, “Keep it simple. Make it young.” They mean it. When I was in New York a month ago, my friend and editor Mary Cash at Holiday House [...]
Andrew Glass and I have both been disappointed with the response to Moby Dick in the book world. We were hoping for starred reviews, but didn’t get any. I don’t think the reviewers knew what to make of it. Several of them seemed hung up on the idea that a picture book is a simple [...]
There’s more sad news in the children’s book world today. We note the passing of giants. A few weeks ago we lost Maurice Sendak. A day ago I learned of Leo Dillon”s passing. Both these men made monumental contributions to children’s literature, especially to the genre of picture books. They proved time and again that [...]
I keep hearing that the picture book genre is dead. The one exception is books for very young children. That used to be defined as kindergarten and below. Now it seems it’s even younger than that: two and three year olds. The pressure is on to get those tots into the Ivy League. They don’t [...]
I’m often surprised by the misconceptions people have about picture books. Most think that the author and artist work closely together; that they’re good friends; that they create picture books from scratch. That may be true for some authors and artists. It certainly isn’t the case for me. Most of the time I never meet [...]
