Tuesday Kidlit Trivia for April 9, 2024

 This authhor/illustrator was born April 3, 1953 and grew up as a Quaker in Philadelphia, attending Germantown Friends School and later, Yale. She studied drama at Berkely, and later described her writing as "the culmination of a lifetime spent joyfully squandering an expensive education on producing works of no apparent significance." Her writing and illustrating career began with greeting cards, and her "Hippo Birdies, Two Ewes" birthday card has sold over 10 million copies. She moved on to board books, featuring whimsical hippos, cows, chickens and more, and has turned several of her books into songs. This is Sandra Boynton, and she is currently working on a Christmas album called Cows and Holly which will feature Lyle Lovett, Yo-Yo Ma, and others.

Madness Poetry returns!

 I always love this contest, where the judges are kids and fellow writers. The event is now in it's 11th year, so the application poem had to relate to the number 11. This is my entry:

The One After Ten
The 11th commandment should be maybe...
"Thou shalt not wake a sleeping baby."
"Throweth no shoes over telephone wires,"
"No tissues or crayons in washers or dryers."
Or "Liveth ye not beyond thine means,"
Or "Feedeth not thine chihuahua beans."

Tuesday Kidlit Trivia for April 2, 2024

This Chicago native wrote songs for Johnny Cash ("Boy Named Sue"), Loretta Lynn ("One's On The Way"), Dr. Hook ("Cover of the Rolling Stone") and the Irish Rovers ("The Unicorn"). His cartoons appeared in the military publication Stars and Stripes and also in Playboy. He played guitar, piano, saxophone and trombone, but it was his talent in writing poetry for children that endeared him to elementary school teachers and their students. This was Shel Silverstein, and his most famous collection is called Where the Sidewalk Ends.

Tuesday Kidlit Trivia for March 19, 2024

   Science was a lifelong passion since childhood for this New Jersey author. After getting her psychology degree she worked as a librarian, and it was then, 1n 1971, that she wrote her first children's book, Cockroaches. She is better known for her series of books about a passionate teacher who takes her students on incredible field trips. They become raindrops to study their city's waterworks, and red blood cells to learn about the human body. The books have won nemerous awards for the factual information they provide in a fantasy setting. They are the Magic School Bus books, written by Joanna Cole, 1944-2020.

Tuesday Kidlit Trivia for March 12, 2024

 This creator was born in New Jersey in 1956, the youngest of five chidren, in a family where art supplies were abundant. His love of drawing led him to the Rhode Island School of Design, and a career that began illustrating books by others. But it was his own wordless book Free Fall that won the Caldecott Honor Medal for illustration in 1988. His later Caldecott Medal winner featured frogs floating through a sleepy town, and in another of his books a science project sends up seedlings which fill the sky with giant vegetables.This imaginative, humorous illustrator is David Wiesner.

Tuesday Kidlit Trivia for February 27, 2024

 This elementary school teacher from Michigan used twisted fairy tales to inspire his lessons. This led to  writing picture books, such one about the three little pigs from the wolf's point of view, and one about a  prince who thinks his life may have been better when he was a frog before he kissed the nagging princess. His 1992 collection of stories incudes Little Red Running Shorts and The Princess and the Bowling Ball. This is the very imaginative Jon Scieszka, born in 1954 and living happily ever after.

Tuesday Kidlit Trivia for February 13, 2024

 Born in Los Angeles in 1998, this African American poet said her earliest stories were "very Anne of Green Gables" until she discovered Toni Morrison in high school, and realized that stories could be about people who looked like her. Her children's book Change Sings is perhaps not as well known as the poem she read at President Biden's inaguration, The Hill We Climb. This is Amanda Gorman.