Tuesday Kidlit Trivia for July 30, 2024

This childless cat lady, born in Austria in 1910, studied art and music in Vienna and married an ornithologist in 1935. As Europe became more frightening, her Jewish husband sent her ahead to Kenya to find a safer place to live. But on the ship she met a botanist who became her second husband. As that marriage faded she went on safari and met a game warden whom she married in 1944. When he shot a lioness in self-defense, the couple raised the young cubs and the author wrote about their experiences teaching the smallest cub, Elsa, how to survive in the wild. This book led to more books, a movie and a song. The author was murdered just before she turned 70, stabbed to death by an angry former employee. This was Joy Adamson and her 1960 book was Born Free. Her husband was killed by poachers 9 years later. The Elsa Conservation Trust which the couple founded continues to aid wildlife.

Tuesday KidLit Trivia for July 23, 2024

 My 15 year old dachsund had all his remaining teeth extracted today, which reminded me of the picture book Dr. DeSoto. It's the story of a brave mouse dentist whose patient is a fox, and it's one of several books by this Brooklyn-born author who also created the character Shrek. He worked as a cartoonist before he started writing, to help his family during the Depression, and his drawings appeared often in the New Yorker magazine. He won the Caldecott award for his illustrations in Sylvester and the Magic Pebble in 1970. He died at the age of 95 in 2003. This is William Steig.

Tuesday Kidlit Trivia for July 9, 2024

 Wherever his family moved, this author/illustrator and his scientist dad collaborated on science journals. When he started college he planned to follow in his father's footseps, but he saw that the graphic design majors seemed to be having way more fun than the science students, so he went in that direction. He met his wife artist Robin Page in North Carolina at design school, and they moved to New York City and then to Boulder, Colorado. His carefully detailed torn-and-cut-paper illustrations reflected his love of nature in his books "Actual Size," "Biggest, Strongest, Fastest" and he won the Caldecott award for "What Do You Do With A Tail Like That?" He and his wife collaborated on many of his 80 books, and on raising their three children. Getting kids excited about science was his great joy. He died of an aneurism in 2021 at the age of 69. This was Steve Jenkins.

Tuesday Kidlit Trivia for July 2, 2024

 This California author got his BA at University of the Pacific on a full basketball scholarship. He combined his passions for his Mexican heritage and sports in his 2008 young adult novel, Mexican White Boy, which was banned from classrooms in Tuscon AZ in 2012 because it mentioned "critical race theory." But a court later ruled that this ban violated the rights of Mexican American students. He won the 2016 Newbery Medal for his picture book about a boy and his grandmother's trip through the city on a bus. He currently teaches creative writing at San Diego State University, and his most recent picture book is Milo Imagines the World. This is Matt de la Pena.