poetry Archives - Page 7 of 293

Window Music
by Anastasia Suen (Author) and Wade Zahares (Illustrator)

Booktalk: Window music is an old railroad term for the scenery outside the window. When I found these words in a library book, I knew I had to write this 80-word poem about the scenery between my hometown Los Angeles and the seaside town of Santa Barbara.

The illustrator lived in Maine, so he added snow! I was surprised at first because it doesn’t snow on that route, but as you can see in the illustration below, it’s a nice touch.

Snippet:

After Window Music came out in 1998, it was a Book of the Month selection and a New York Times Best Illustrated Book! (I’m not the only one who likes to look out the window!) In 2014, thanks to Liz Nealon, it was published as an e-book, the format it still exists in today.

It’s #ThrowbackThursday!
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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!