Marianne Berkes encourages her readers to explore the outdoors and connect to nature, a love nurtured by her parents when she was a child. She remembers biking on forest paths with her father, and fishing in Long Island Sound from a pontoon boat that her father built. “It was white with blue polka dots and we called her Nelly Bell.”
Berkes remembers that her mother filled their home with singing and her grandfather told stories, further shaping her as a writer-to-be. One summer when Berkes was nine or ten years old, she and her friends wrote, directed and starred in a musical play in her backyard. In high school, she wrote for the school newspaper and in college she wrote her first picture book for a creative writing class. Before Berkes turned to writing as a profession, she founded a nursery school where she taught for several years, directed children’s musical theater in the summer, wrote press releases and transcribed sermons as Norman Vincent Peale’s media director, and moved to Florida and became a children’s librarian for the Florida Public Library. More…
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