Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

Also the author of Caldecott Honor Book Swamp Angel, Anne Isaacs was born and raised in Buffalo, New York.She feels most at home in rural environments such as the redwood forest near Santa Cruz, California where she lives with her family. Her husband and three children have built their own treehouse, which they share with several squirrels and blue jays. “All my life,” says Anne Isaacs, “poetry has affected me more than any other genre. I have read and memorized it, studied it, loved, and written it since I was nine.”Ms. Isaacs lives in Santa Cruz, California with her family.”It’s a little surprising to me, when I think back over my childhood in suburban Chicago, and recall the things I liked and the things I did, that I never considered the possibility of becoming a book illustrator. During my elementary school years I was always collaborating with classmates to create imaginary worlds and the stories to take place in them and putting it all down in pictures.”In the third grade I drew bestiaries of ridiculous animals, their habits and habitats; in fifth grade my best friend and I, working through the mail, developed an island world of two competing countries. I think they were called Igglebeania and Squigglebeania (I know we never did agree about the spelling), and they teemed with colorful characters and important incidents. They now, like Atlantis, are lost to the world. At fourteen we wrote a novel about a monkey astronaut who saves the world from encroaching gorillas. Of course I made the pictures, and my friend’s father took it on himself to send our opus out to real publishers for their consideration. It was with no small shock that several years ago, as I was leafing through my friend’s scrapbook, I lit on a polite rejection letter from a publisher who was now a friend and with whom I had just published two books!

Kevin Hawkes is the illustrator of more than forty books for children, including The Three Mouths of Little Tom Drum by Nancy Willard; Weslandia and Sidewalk Circus by Paul Fleischman; and Handel, Who Knew What He Liked and Me, All Alone, at the End of the World by M. T. Anderson. Kevin Hawkes lives in southern Maine.