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Spring 2000 Flying Starts: Shana Corey and Chelsey McLaren
A devotee of feminist history and a fashion-industry maven might seem a volatile author-illustrator combination, yet Shana Corey and Chesley McLaren make an auspicious match in You Forgot Your Skirt, Amelia Bloomer! (Scholastic), their gleeful skewering of "proper ladies." Amelia details how its title character shocked 1850s Seneca Falls, N.Y., by wearing the billowy pants that came to bear her name ("bloomers"). Yet although Amelia Bloomer campaigned for women's suffrage and the temperance movement, this is no textbook history.
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Spring 2000 Flying Starts: E.R. Frank
As someone who has found a way to marry her two professional passions, writing and social work, E.R. Frank considers herself pretty lucky. And in fact, for her one would not be possible without the other. From a young age, Frank enjoyed writing because it was a way to express herself and make sense of the world; as a social worker helping some of New York City's neediest, she uses writing as both a release and a tool to better understand her patients.
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Spring 2000 Flying Starts: Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich
No stranger to books--he is, after all, art director at HarperInformation--Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich never planned to publish one himself.
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Spring 2000 Flying Starts: Kate DiCamillo
Her name is Kate DiCamillo, and three winters ago when temperatures in Minneapolis hit 30 degrees below, as pieces of her car door were falling off due to the freezing cold and a strong case of homesickness for her native Florida was setting in, she got an idea for her first novel. This is what happened: she was just about to go to sleep when the book's narrator, India Opal Buloni, spoke to her, saying, "I have a dog named Winn-Dixie." DiCamillo says that after hearing that voice, "the story told itself." The story became Because of Winn-Dixie (Candlewick, Mar.), and its author says that the spirit of it remains, just the way Opal (as the book's heroine calls herself) told it to her.
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Spring 2000 Flying Starts: D.B. Johnson
There's something about the woods of New England. For years they have inspired such renowned writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost and Henry David Thoreau. In fact, Thoreau's classic Walden, about his two years of simple living in a woodland cabin, had such a profound effect on a young D.B. (Don) Johnson that it has informed his life, and most certainly his blossoming career as a children's book author-illustrator.
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Spring 2000 Flying Starts
PW Home Bestsellers Subscribe Search Children's Features Flying StartsStaff -- 6/26/00Seven authors and illustrators made auspicious debuts this spring D.B. Johnson | Kate DiCamilloRoberto de Vicq de Cumptich | E.R. Frank Shana Corey and Chesley McLaren | Lori Williams There's something about the woods of New England. For years they have inspired such renowned writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost and Henry David Thoreau. ...
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Amiri Baraka: Fierce Fictions, Radical Truths
As the car carrying PW's interviewer proceeds through Newark, N.J.'s black neighborhoods, one recognizes many of the street names--Hillside, Central Avenue, Newark Street--that crop up in Amiri Baraka's fiction.
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Fall 1999 Flying Starts: Karen English: A Testament to Perseverance
The inspiration for Karen English's historical novel, Francie (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), came, ironically, from a rejection letter. English had originally written it as a picture book about an African-American girl helping her mother with the laundry in a boarding house in the pre-Civil Rights South. But a thoughtful rejection letter from an editor suggested that the story read more like the beginning of a novel.
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Fall 1999 Flying Starts: Kristen Balouch: Music and Computers Help Tell a Story
There's no denying that computers are increasingly becoming a bigger part of everyday life. It's no surprise then, that a new generation of talented artists has adopted these machines as a medium for creative expression.
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Fall 1999 Flying Starts: Lynne Rae Perkins: Writing from Experience
When Lynne Rae Perkins signs copies of her first novel, All Alone in the Universe (Greenwillow), she inscribes "Eat pie and be kind," and draws a piece of pie. This is inspired by one of the final scenes of her book, in which her main character, Debbie, tries to imagine her perfect life and sees herself eating pie. "It's just a nice thing to do," Perkins says. So is being kind, she says. Perkins wants children who read this inscription--and her book--to realize that "there are a lot of people out there who are willing to care about you, but that you have to be willing to care about people, too."
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Fall 1999 Flying Starts: Warren Linn: A Book Born of a Friendship
Sarah and I met in kindergarten," answers artist Warren Linn when asked how he hooked up with author Sarah Weeks to create Happy Birthday, Frankie, which HarperCollins published under its Laura Geringer imprint.
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Fall 1999 Flying Starts: Laurie Halse Anderson: In Dreams Begin Responsibilities
One night, Laurie Halse Anderson awoke to the sound of a child crying. After checking on her own two children and finding them asleep, she realized that what she had heard was a nightmare in her own head.
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Fall 1999 Flying Starts: Rebecca Bond: A Combination of Talents
I was wrapped up in stories from as far back as I can remember," says Rebecca Bond, author-illustrator of Just Like a Baby (Little, Brown).
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Michael Lewis: Seeking the Soul of Silicon Valley
"I was looking for the Valley's Gatsby, someone who really represented the values of the place."
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Nikki Giovanni: Three Decades on the Edge
Nikki Giovanni: "I don't answer to the bestseller Gods...I answer to the ancestral Gods."
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Spring 1999 Flying Starts: Amy Walrod
To hear Amy Walrod tell it, her "flying start" as a children's illustrator has been a long time coming. "I had a difficult couple of years there," says the 1995 Rhode Island School of Design graduate, whose quirky paint-and-paper collages animate James Howe's Horace and Morris but Mostly Dolores (Atheneum, Mar.).
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Spring 1999 Flying Starts: Jennifer Holm
The idea for Jennifer Holm's novel Our Only May Amelia (HarperCollins) emerged from a Christmas present. Six years ago, while unpacking an old suitcase in her grandmother's house, Holm's Aunt Elizabeth found a diary kept by Holm's grand-aunt Alice Amelia Holm when she was a teenager in the early 1900s, living in what is now the state of Washington. Elizabeth typed and circulated the diary as a present to family members a few months later at Christmastime. To Holm's surprise, the diary "wasn't any different from what I would have written when I was that age. It got me thinking what it would be like to grow up as I did with brothers but out in the middle of nowhere in a wilderness at a very exciting time."
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Spring 1999 Flying Starts: Jonathan Frost
Jonathan Frost was in junior high when he made up his mind to be an artist. It wasn't until over two decades later, however, that he turned his hand to children's books, with the publication of Gowanus Dogs (FSG/Foster).
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Spring 1999 Flying Starts: Karen Romano Young
Like the illustrious vehicle in Karen Romano Young's fresh and funny novel, the framework for The Beetle and Me (Greenwillow) had been around for awhile and just needed some tuning up. While in high school, Young had written and illustrated a picture book called The Blue Volkswagen, starring a boy named Daniel and his father, who traveled to another planet littered with broken down cars that needed fixing. The father-son pair will sound familiar to those who've read The Beetle and Me. The titular VW's color may have changed from blue to purple, the setting may be on this planet, and Daniel and his father may have moved from leading to supporting roles, but the author's love of the vintage Beetle remains constant.
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Spring 1999 Flying Starts: David Almond
When David Almond's novel Skellig (Delacorte, May) appeared last year in the author's native England, his publisher, Hodder Children's Books, had to go back to press after only four days. And when Skellig won the Whitbread Award, it looked like an overnight sensation--but Almond's success as a novelist was almost 20 years in the making.
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