Subway

Subway
by Anastasia Suen (Author) and Karen Katz (Illustrator)
@ Amazon | Bookshop

Booktalk: We didn’t have any subways nearby when I was growing up, so riding a subway was something I did years later when we went on family vacations with our children. On one of those vacations, I thought about writing a small poem about the ride, but that was hard to do when I was back home.

After two post-vacation writing attempts, I realized that I needed to write the poem while I was riding the subway. So that’s what I did! Each time we rode the subway during our next vacation, I jotted down a few lines about what we did and how it felt. (I always keep a small pad of paper in my purse to capture ideas.)

Snippet:

When we got back home I used those small notepad lines to write this 169-word picture book poem. As you can see from the book announcement postcard below, Subway was published in 2004.

A few years later, the publisher asked me to tighten the poem so it could be reprinted as a board book. After the 2008 board book appeared in Amazon’s Top 100 for Children’s City Life Books, Amazon made a preview video for it!

It’s #ThrowbackThursday!
Copyright © 2026 Anastasia Suen All Rights Reserved. (*bookstore affiliate)

Extreme Birdwatching

Extreme Birdwatching: Measuring Change on a Galápagos Island
by Loree Griffin Burns (Author) and Jamie Green (Illustrator)
@ Amazon | Bookshop

Booktalk: Daphne is an island. Not one you’d choose for a vacation. There are no sandy beaches, resorts, hotels, or houses. No tall trees to make shade. The steep, rocky sides of a volcanic Galápagos island are not inviting, and most who visit this part of the world sail right past. But Peter and Rosemary Grant are not most people. A husband-and-wife team, the Grants came to this singular place with a singular goal: to study two species of wild finch. For decades, the scientists and their students counted, cataloged, and observed finches on a remote mile-wide island. Through teamwork, painstaking observation—extreme bird-watching, extreme plant study, extreme seed counting—and careful beak measurements, the group of committed scientists proved step-by-step, over forty years, how finch beaks change in response to their environment.

Snippet:

The author, Loree Griffin Burns, is one of my former students.
Copyright © 2026 Anastasia Suen All Rights Reserved. (*bookstore affiliate)