Complementing my interviews, today’s Author Spotlight, the three hundred and seventy-third, is of children’s author and blogger Edith Fine. If you would like to take part in an author spotlight, take a look at author-spotlights.
Still a big fan of Michigan, her home state, Edith now lives and writes in southern California. She went from teaching to writing, holding her first published book in her hands in 1989.
Edith’s books include the award-winning Under the Lemon Moon (Lee & Low Books), Cricket at the Manger (Boyds Mills Press), Water, Weed, and Wait (Tricycle Press, Random House), and Cryptomania! Teleporting into Greek and Latin with the CryptoKids, a zany teleporting adventure for young readers that covers 200 basic Greek and Latin roots.
Not one to stick with a single genre, Edith has written four biographies for young readers (geneticist Barbara McClintock, author Gary Paulsen, Martin Luther King Jr., and Rosa Parks). Two user-friendly grammar guides, Nitty-Gritty Grammar and More Nitty-Gritty Grammar (Ten Speed Press, Random House), highlight common bloopers and feature popular syndicated comics that will lower the anxiety of grammarphobes; co-authored with Judith Josephson. They blog monthly as the Grammar Patrol at http://eFrogPress.com.
Fine and Josephson also collaborated on Armando and the Blue Tarp School (Lee & Low Books), a picture book based on the work of David Lynch who went to volunteer at the Tijuana dump in 1980. Finding no school, he spread a tarp on the ground and began to teach. He’s now in his thirty-fourth year of working with students who live by the dump and has extended his work to the dump near Matagalpa, Nicaragua. Armando was nominated for a California Young Readers Medal and named a Children’s Choice by One Book, One San Diego.
Edith is active in the San Diego Chapter of SCBWI (the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators) where she heads the published members’ group. Her four grandkids live nearby. She swims daily, enjoys cooking and baking, reads voraciously, and has fun with friends and her invaluable critique groups.
Sleepytime Me, her seventeenth book, came out this May 2014 (today, in fact!) from Random House with illustrations by Christopher Denise. It starts, “Splashy sunset paints the sky. Shy moon tiptoes, climbs up high . . .”
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And now from the author herself: