I’m sorry that these photos don’t show every step in our creation of George, the Scribble, at the  Zigler Head Start Center, in New Haven, Connecticut last month. Because he is quite a character: he wears a hat, plays the trumpet, and rides a motorcycle. A dozen different preschoolers helped draw him, beginning with one scribble. [...]

The Tassy Walden New Voices in Children’s Literature Awards ceremony is a stellar event. I mean it, this hard-earned recognition for a writer is a moment when the clouds clear and the stars shine and shimmer not on everyone, or that one, but on you.
I was a finalist, and after a friend suggested I try [...]

Waiting for the print-publishing world to settle down and start buying again a a real downer. You can start to spend way too much time trying to read the minds of editors and publishers. You wonder if you should change your style. Switch subjects? Do a complete rewrite of the [...]

Barbie as computer software engineer has been creating quite a controversy. I’ve read about it in the Wall Street Journal and heard about it on NPR.
Apparently Barbie has an annual career theme! Who knew? Even more astounding, an organized effort among female computer geeks hijacked the voting for Barbie’s annual career choice. They wanted [...]

Picture a hulking sophomore guy, a football player with C- grades, barely. The school gave up on him. “Take more shop” the counselor said when he dared to ask about an art course. He came from a bi-lingual blue collar home with a carpenter father and a stay at home mom. There were [...]

I love to write poetry with children. At a super fun after-school workshop with K-5th graders at Tabor Community Center, I chose spiders as a topic. I took the children on a spider walk (hunt) outside.  We came inside and did a group warm up by building a yarn/string spider web between us. As each [...]