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Patricia NewmanPatricia Newman
Sibert Honor Children's Book Author & Environmentalist
  • Home
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    • A River’s Gifts: The Mighty Elwha River Reborn
    • Planet Ocean
    • Eavesdropping on Elephants
    • Neema’s Reason To Smile
    • Zoo Scientists to the Rescue
    • Sea Otter Heroes: The Predators That Saved an Ecosystem
    • Plastic, Ahoy! Investigating the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
    • Ebola: Fears and Facts
    • Jingle the Brass
    • Nugget on the Flight Deck
    • Surviving Animal Attacks
    • Elite Operations series
    • Energy Lab series
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Pamela S. Turner, science writer

PAMELA S. TURNER'S WEBSITE

SELECTIONS FROM PAMELA S. TURNER’S LIBRARY

The Frog Scientist, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.
A Life in the Wild: George Schaller’s Struggle to Save the Last Great Beasts, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2008.
Life on Earth…and Beyond: An Astrobiologist’s Quest, Charlesbridge, 2008.
Gorilla Doctors: Saving Endangered Great Apes, Harcourt Houghton Mifflin, 2005.
Hachiko: The True Story of a Loyal Dog, Harcourt Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

Upcoming
Prowling the Seas: Exploring the Hidden World of Ocean Predators, Walker & Co., November 2009.
Project Sea Horse, Harcourt Houghton Mifflin, spring 2010.
Comet Chaser, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, TBA.


Meet Pamela S. Turner

Pamela S. Turner, the award-winning author of several science books for children, parlayed her high school love of science into a career in health planning, epidemiology and health policy research. She and her husband met as exchange students in Kenya, and traveled the world. Turner’s three children were born in three different countries. After a stint in Tokyo, Turner and her family returned to the U.S. “By that time I was doing policy research and I was not that into it,” she says. “I really wanted to go back to my original ambition, but I was scared to try it. Afraid that I wouldn’t be any good.”

As a child, Turner told anyone who asked that she wanted to write and illustrate children’s books when she grew up. “My mom used to buy shelf paper because drawing pads were too expensive,” she says. Turner was an avid reader as a child; the day she applied for her first library card stands out in her memory. “It was a big moment,” she says. “I had to be able to write my name.”

After returning from Japan, the desire to write was stronger than her trepidation so Turner studied the children’s book market and applied what she learned to her manuscripts. Her first book, Hachiko: The True Story of a Loyal Dog is based on a well-known Japanese story that was unfamiliar to many Americans. Turner approached publishers who had a history of publishing cross-cultural or Asian literature and a Harcourt editor plucked her manuscript from the slush pile.

Shortly after Hachiko was published, Turner mentioned to her editor that she’d like to write for Harcourt’s Scientists in the Field series. One of Turner’s friends is affiliated with the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project, and for two weeks, she visited Rwanda and Uganda following the vets who strive to save endangered mountain gorillas. “I don’t write about the things I know,” Turner says, “rather I write about what I want to know.”Gorilla Doctors: Saving Endangered Great Apes was Turner’s first nonfiction science book for children.

Using her own curiosity as a guide, Turner contacts experts in their fields and asks if they would be willing to talk to her about their research. The idea for her latest book,The Frog Scientist, came from a San Francisco Chronicle article about Tyrone Hayes, a Berkeley scientist who studies the effects of pesticides on frogs and ultimately the environment. Turner describes Hayes as “funny and thought-provoking. An ideal subject [for a book].” The first time Turner met Hayes he said to her, “Wow! I have those same earrings!”

A Life in the Wild: George Schaller’s Struggle to Save the Last Great Beasts is this year’s Golden Kite recipient. Turner describes Schaller as “the Michael Jordan of field biologists. I was scared to even approach him.” Schaller contributed a photograph to Turner’s Gorilla Doctors and refused payment when he learned that Turner donates half of her royalties to the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project. Turner was surprised to discover that no one had yet written a biography for children on George Schaller. He graciously consented to an interview, and his gorgeous wildlife photos grace the book.

Once Turner decides on a subject for a book, she reads dozens of books and articles as background material. “For the Schaller book,” Turner says, “there were 16 books written by other people and I read all of them.” As a nonfiction author, Turner is also responsible for providing photographs for her books. For The Frog Scientist, she hired Andy Comins, a professional photographer.

Turner interviewed scientists at the Tagging of Pacific Predators program (TOPP) to writeProwling the Seas: Exploring the Hidden World of Ocean Predators. The TOPP program tags and follows specific marine predators and records in-depth information on their habits. In the book, Turner follows one great white shark, one bluefin tuna, a pair of Sooty Shearwater seabirds, and one leatherback sea turtle. Turner relied on a variety of scientists and professional photographers for photographs, and requested responsibility for the graphics. “Normally I would never want to do the graphics,” she says, “but I felt they were really important because I wanted the tracks of the individual animals. I felt strongly about how they should look.” Turner hired the TOPP webmaster who not only had graphics experience, but had experience working with the predators’ tracking data. “The photos and graphics ate up my entire advance!” she says.

When Turner is not traveling the world researching her newest book, she writes from her home in Oakland. “Most of my books are directed towards the [twelve year old] kid I remember being,” she says. “I always loved the animal characters in my favorite books—something I had as a child that I never grew out of.” She says the biggest misconception about writing for children is “it’s easy because it’s shorter. Using a limited vocabulary to explain complex scientific concepts means I’m automatically handicapping myself.”

Caroline Arnold
CAROLINE ARNOLD'S WEBSITE

SELECTIONS FROM CAROLINE ARNOLD’S LIBRARY

A Polar Bear’s World, PictureWindow Books, 2010.
A Walrus’ World, PictureWindow Books, 2010.
A Moose’s World, PictureWindow Books, 2010.
Global Warming and the Dinosaurs, Clarion, 2009.
A Platypus’ World, PictureWindow Books, 2008.
A Wombat’s World, PictureWindow Books, 2008.
Taj Mahal, Carolrhoda Books, 2007.
Super Swimmers: Whales, Dolphins and Other Mammals of the Sea, Charlesbridge, 2007.
Wiggle and Waggle, Charlesbridge, 2007 (fiction).
Birds: Nature’s Magnificent Flying Machines, Charlesbridge, 2003.

Upcoming
A Warmer World, Charlesbridge, 2012.
Too Hot? Too Cold?, Charlesbridge, 2012.

Meet Caroline Arnold

Most people know Caroline Arnold as the beloved children’s author of more than 100 nonfiction books for children. The Washington Post/Children’s Book Guild awarded her their coveted Nonfiction Award for her lifetime achievements (“Not that my lifetime is over,” she quips). Arnold has written about animals, habitats, and ancient civilizations, but what many of her readers do not know is that she was trained in the fine arts.

Arnold writes about things in which she is still interested. As a child in Minneapolis, Minnesota, she was a self-described book worm. “When I was eight years old, I used to ride my bike to the library by myself. I had my own library card and my bike had a large wire basket on the front,” she says. “My goal was to check out 14 books because we could keep them for two weeks. I figured one book a day.” In addition to reading, Arnold was curious about the outdoors. “I used to go on early morning bird walks with my father who was an amateur bird watcher.” Flowers, insects, and rocks made up her many nature collections. “We had a museum in our basement of our prize finds,” she says. A five-week camping trip across the United States from Minnesota to California was Arnold’s first introduction to Mesa Verde National Park with its unique cliff dwellings, a topic she later explored in her book The Ancient Cliff Dwellers of Mesa Verde.

“I didn’t know I was going to be a writer when I was growing up,” Arnold says. Instead, she focused on art in college and graduate school, and considered writing and illustrating children’s books after her two children were born. Although Arnold intended to illustrate her books, it quickly became obvious to her that you cannot draw pictures until you have a story. She plugged away, piling up rejection letters, until she moved to California and took a class on writing for children at the UCLA Extension. Her first book, Five Nests, debuted in 1980, but was illustrated by Ruth Sanderson—a common practice at the time to pair a new author with an established illustrator. Four more books followed before Arnold became author and illustrator using a pencil line drawing style. “I became an established author to illustrate my own books,” she says, but the three color technique of the time made illustrations extremely challenging. “I had to illustrate the book three times,” Arnold says. “Once for the black plate and twice more for the other two colors.” Then she analyzed the saturation levels of each color and converted it to a black and white scale. “I was never sure how the color would look until it was printed.”

With the publication of Five Nests, birds became a recurring theme in Arnold’s work and throughout her life, with husband, Art, who studies birds in his research at UCLA. Arnold took advantage of this connection to conduct research for Hawk Highway in the Sky: Watching Raptor Migration. “I spent a week in the Goshute Mountains in Nevada watching and helping scientists trap and band migrating hawks, eagles, and falcons…the process helped me learn the details I needed to write the book.”

About this time, Arnold developed a prolific partnership with well-known magazine photographer Richard Hewitt. They collaborated on 50 books, Hewitt contributing his vast experience in visual storytelling, and Arnold contributing not only her writing talents, but her fine arts knowledge of visual elements, such as pacing and balance. They shared the creative process, finding a common ground for their goals which sometimes necessitated a compromise in their individual visions or an alternate solution. When Hewitt retired at the end of the 1990s, Arnold was forced to rethink the trajectory of her career. “It was sad to see [the partnership] come to an end,” she says, “but that’s the way life is, things end or they change.”

In spite of the success of her books with Hewitt, “we were limited by photography’s limitations,” she says. They did not have access to animals who live in remote places or who were nocturnal. According to Arnold, moving back to illustrated books “gave me a certain freedom to tell the story and explore ideas that I couldn’t explore in photographic books.” This fact, combined with the advances in four-color illustration technology gave Arnold the freedom to choose other media for her illustrations.

Arnold’s recent series of books incorporates her love of animals with her love of art. For example, in A Platypus’ World, she brings children closer to a nocturnal animal that lives in burrows or swims underwater and is almost impossible to see in the wild. Her cut-paper illustrations provide the perfect vehicle to illustrate the life cycle of this reclusive animal. “Cut-paper collage is not that different [from my earlier work],” Arnold says. “I use scissors rather than a pencil, but the key element is still the line. In cut-paper, the line is the edge.”

With each book, Arnold perfects the text with her editor before beginning work on the illustrations. “Each book demands its own color scheme,” she says of her new graphic-looking style for the early elementary school audience at which the series is aimed. “It’s bright, easily accessible, and the big pictures are easy to see from the back of a classroom.”

Arnold’s new travel blog, The Intrepid Tourist (http://theintrepidtourist.blogspot.com) is an unpublished endeavor that focuses on her travels to various parts of the world. In the past many of her books took root because of a journey she made or a place she visited, and the odds are that yet another book will spring from her travel musings. “I’ve never met an idea that I didn’t like,” Arnold says.

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  • Home
  • Books
    • A River’s Gifts: The Mighty Elwha River Reborn
    • Planet Ocean
    • Eavesdropping on Elephants
    • Neema’s Reason To Smile
    • Zoo Scientists to the Rescue
    • Sea Otter Heroes: The Predators That Saved an Ecosystem
    • Plastic, Ahoy! Investigating the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
    • Ebola: Fears and Facts
    • Jingle the Brass
    • Nugget on the Flight Deck
    • Surviving Animal Attacks
    • Elite Operations series
    • Energy Lab series
    • QuickReads Fluency Library
    • English language-learner books
    • Writers write all kinds of things
  • Author Visit Programs
    • FAQs
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  • Educator Resources
    • STEM + Literacy Activities
    • LitLinks
    • Teacher Guides
    • KidLit creators who make kids want to read
  • Writer Resources
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  • Contact
    • Stay In Touch