Hello again, it’s Barb Rosenstock. PBB asked me to return to fill-in for Pat Zietlow Miller for a few months. I decided to develop a series of posts on picture book editors by interviewing the style-makers and award-winners—the folks who run their own imprints. I hope you learn as much …
It’s killing me, it’s genius…Patricia MacLachlan wrote a perfect nonfiction picture book using only one sentence. Well, technically there’s two question marks, but still…The Iridescence of Birds is a biography of Henri Matisse that manages to convey most of his childhood environment, his relationship with his mother, his interests, his personality …
Trying to read all the picture books published in a given year is daunting. So, I confess to cheating—keeping up only with the current books in the genre I tend to write (biographies, social studies, history.) Ask me (as some teachers recently did) about great science picture books and you’ll …
Jonah Winter’s first picture book biography came out around 20 years ago. He has done another fine book in Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio illustrated by the great James E. Ransome. Winter breaks the “rule” of staying under 1000 words (I quickly counted between 1300-1500, plus an author’s note.) Why? To tell a …
Long before I wrote picture books, my sons literally had to beg me to take “true” picture books out of our library. I assumed picture book nonfiction was a shorter version of a social studies text. It didn’t take long before I found myself rereading these books after my boys …