To Blurb or Not to Blurb
I love a good read. As for a free book, that gets me salivating as quickly as the offer of dark chocolate. Well, almost! So when a publisher sends me a book to blurb, my initial response is elation. After all, a new book promises the potential of a new literary adventure. Or it may […]
Barack Obama
You know how I’m always saying I’m up for a challenge? Well, with this book, God called me on it. Everything about this book was impossible. In 2008, I was going along, minding my own business, writing my books and sweating the latest deadline. I’d instructed my agent to restrain herself from offering me any new […]
At Break of Day
How do you retell a story that’s been told a thousand times? How do you make it new, and fresh? Those were the questions I asked myself when I got the idea to write a creation story. But I didn’t get to that point on my own. I hadn’t been sitting around thinking about writing any […]
It’s Raining Laughter
If there’s such a thing as a backwards approach to creating a picture book, I’m something of an expert. On three separate occasions, I’ve crafted books in precisely that way. First, there was Something On My Mind, with art by Tom Feelings. Next came From a Child’s Heart, with art by Brenda Joysmith. And last […]
A Pocketful of Poems
True confessions: I have an obsessive-compulsive personality. Fortunately, I channel in mostly healthy ways. A Pocketful of Poems is a prime example. Back in the 1990’s (was it that long ago?) I came across The Essential Haiku, edited by Robert Hass. Once I planted my face in this collection of poems by Basho, Buson, and […]
The Road to Paris
I spent several years in and out of foster care when I was a child. Little wonder, then, that foster children pop up in my poems and stories. I didn’t explore the theme in a fuller text, though, until I wrote The Road to Paris. The Road to Paris is a novel about Paris Richmond, a […]
Talkin’ about Bessie, Part II
Talkin’ About Bessie, my biography of aviator, Elizabeth Coleman, was an exercise in extreme patience and perseverance. If you’ve read Part I of this blog post, you already know how taxing this project was from the start! The entire saga was a bit too long for one blog post, though, so I decided to break […]
Talkin’ about Bessie, Part I
The Book that Almost Wasn’t: That could be the title of this book. The journey from concept to bookshelves is a bit of a saga. Some books are harder to birth than others, and Bessie was a book-baby in breach! I’ll explain. It seems like forever ago that then Orchard editor Melanie Kroupa asked me […]
When Gorilla Goes Walking
Godzilla. That was the original name of my feline character. I chose the name because it expressed the size and ferocity of her personality. It was also a bit of a joke, of course, because she was very small and, well, kittenish. But don’t tell her that! As perfect as her chosen name was, I had […]
Jazmin’s Notebook
Jazmin’s Notebook, a Coretta Scott King Award Honor Book, was the first novel in which I featured a character who’d been in foster care. Unlike The Road to Paris, which came later, this novel didn’t focus on the foster care experience itself, but did illuminate some of the emotional effects of a child impacted by it. […]