Here are some things I used to tell myself: 1. I can't be a writer because I need to be different from my sisters. (Both are published authors.) 2. I can't be a writer because I am an editor. (I was a children's books editor for the first half of my career. Books I edited included the 2001 Newbery Medal winner, A Year Down Yonder by Richard Peck. How could I compete with Richard Peck?) 3. I can't be a writer because I have never published anything. (See #2) 4. I can't be a nonfiction writer because I don't have the right education. (I got a D+ in Biology 101 and never took a history class after high school.) So what happened to change my mind? A friend who knew I loved to learn about the Titanic gave me a contract to write a book about it. The dam burst! I wrote four nonfiction books for her for the school market. Then I wrote and sold a fiction chapter book, The Genie in the Book, published in 2005. Then my friend Susan Roth, who is a terrific collage artist, asked me to help her write the story of a scientist named Gordon Sato, which became our picture book The Mangrove Tree (2011). Despite (or maybe because of) my bad biology grade, I researched the book like mad, and when Gordon read it he found only two mistakes. (Okay, you don't want to mix up carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide in real life. But that's why we have experts read all our nonfiction books in manuscript.) Now Susan Roth and I are working on our fourth nonfiction picture book together. The other ones are Parrots Over Puerto Rico, which came out in 2013 and won the Sibert Medal for a distinguished informational book for children, and Prairie Dog Song, which came out in 2016 and was on several "best of the year" books. And my first historical fiction book for kids, Huzzah for Liberty, came out in 2017. That is set in Colonial Williamsburg and is about George Washington's dog, Liberty. (I modeled her on my dog, Oatmeal, who has a hard time with commands like "Stay.") What is the moral? Don't tell yourself you can't do stuff. Sure you can!
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