Adventures at Wilder Farm

The 2008 Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards, given by the Jane Addams Peace Association, were just announced last Friday from the Hull-House Museum at the University of Illinois-Chicago. I am very, very proud that One Thousand Tracings received an honor! I’m looking forward to the awards ceremony at the United Nations Plaza in New York this October. I really feel like I’m accepting this particular award on behalf of my grandparents. One Thousand Tracings is their story—their efforts to help people who were suffering after the war and to bring healing to all people. I continue to feel very fortunate that I was able to write their story.

During last year’s awards presentation Susan Griffith read a quote from Jane Addams: “We have learned as common knowledge that much of the insensibility and hardness of the world is due to the lack of imagination which prevents a realization of the experiences of other people.” I love this quote!

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I’ve just sent a pile of Pennies for Elephants artwork to my editor and art director. This is my next book with Hyperion—hopefully a spring/summer 2009 release. The story is based on the true event of Boston area children earning money to buy the first elephants for the zoo in 1914. Here are a few images:

I’ve added these images to the main illustration page on my website and added a few other new images as well.

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Lita is over in Nashua this weekend at the New England SCBWI conference. Apparently she lent her laptop to Kevin Hawkes for the afternoon keynote. I was out yesterday, but when I got home there was a whispered message about the projector not working, and 600 people in the audience, and I could hear Kevin delivering his talk in the background, and Lita said something about being under a table with a bunch of wires and a couple of confused tech guys. These conferences sound fun, maybe I should start going.

I’m proud to say that Lita got the laptop and projector working with about 5 seconds to spare — after the tech guys gave up. If they had listened to Lita in the first place there never would have been a problem…

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