All I didn't know            in Kindergarten

My kindergarten teacher said I would be an artist when I grew up, but it took connecting drawing with the written word before I knew she was right! I grew up with four brothers outside of Albany, New York. My neighborhood was quite rural at the time, so I had lots of time to read and practice drawing.

I loved craft projects and hand work – our Christmas trees often sported entirely new sets of decorations. I took extra classes to learn about techniques, portraits and perspective, even in grade school, and attended Rhode Island School of Design a few summers during high school. I learned a pencil technique there I still use today (those first graphite pencils are still in my drawer). When I was fourteen, a family friend wrote a bunny alphabet book and asked me to illustrate it. She sent it to Random House and they liked the illustrations but not the concept - but I was hooked on illustrating for children! It is still the written word that inspires me to draw and paint.

I was still interested in academic subjects and decided not to go to art school. I attended Kirkland College, now merged into Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. By chance, the president’s wife was Natalie Babbitt (Tuck Everlasting)! She generously set up an independent study with me after seeing my work, teaching me a history of children’s literature and giving me a sentence to illustrate every week. Natalie also taught me pen & ink, using a fine crow quill point, and after two years, urged me to study children’s literature with Dr. Norine Odland at the University of Minnesota. I graduated from there in 1979 with a degree in children’s literature. My first book, Cornstalks and Cannonballs, illustrated in pen & ink, came out in 1980. I worked part time at the Red Balloon children’s bookstore until I could support myself as an illustrator.

I illustrated for children's books and magazines, and taught courses for teachers and librarians on visual language and the art of children’s books, until a divorce and an unstable publishing market sent me back into full-time employment in 2007. Windows With Birds, the first book I both wrote and illustrated came out in 2010. The book is about my youngest son, Daniel, his cat, and our move downtown when he was six. Some of my original work is housed in the Children’s Literature Research Collection at the University of Minnesota and Kate Shelley and the Midnight Express appeared as an animated feature on public television’s “Reading Rainbow.” My Ellis Island book won a Minnesota Book Award in 1995.

I left a career as a residential concierge in 2016 to return to art and help raise my Grandchildren, Jack and Grace, now 6 and 4. I am definitely still up to my elbows in children's books with them - we have had Grandma School all these Covid months! I'm sure they will inspire many things, like my fun GrandyCamp website for active, busy Grandparents!  Please join us there!

My 46th book, Sadie Braves the Wilderness, written by Yvonne Pearson, was published in the spring of 2017. Fingers crossed for my 47th book, now in the submission process.