Dear Reader, Here are the postcards and snapshots that
Stringbean Coe and his brother Fred sent home from the long trip
they made one summer in Fred''s truck. Their grandfather made this
album for the family--and for you. Enjoy yourselves Love, Vera and
JenniferStringbean Coe, his big brother, Fred, and their dog,
Potato, are driving from Kansas to California in a pickup truck
with a little house built on the back. Reading the postcards they
send home every day is the next best thing to having a
cross-country adventure all your own. "A good-hearted celebration
of life and experience, and a gift to the public."--School Library
Journal
關於作者:
Vera B. Williams is the creator of many distinguished books and
was the U.S. Illustrator Nominee for the 2004 Hans Christian
Andersen Award. She lives in New York City. In Her Own Words...
"Throughout my childhood I was encouraged to make pictures, tell
stories, act, and dance—all of this at a heaven in our New York
City neighborhood called the Bronx House. "On Saturdays I painted
with a crusading art director, Florence Cane. In her book The
Growth of the Child Through Art, I appear under the name Linda. I
was sixteen when the book appeared and embarrassed by it. But at
age nine I had been totally proud when a painting of mine was
exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and I was later shown in the
Movietone News explaining to Eleanor Roosevelt its Yiddish title,
"Yentas." "In 1945 I went to Black Mountain College in North
Carolina, a unique educational community. I graduated in 1949 in
graphic art, which I studied with Josef Albers. Along the way I
planted corn, made butter, worked on the printing press, and helped
to build the house in which I lived with Paul Williams, a fellow
student I married there. "I wanted that connection of art and
community to continue. And it did at the Gate Hill Cooperative, a
community we built with other Black Mountain people—a poet,
musicians, and potters. I lived and worked there from 1953-1970
after which I moved to Canada. My children Sarah, Jenny, and
Merce grew up there. For them, we branched out into a school, part
of the Surnmerhill movement. The gingerbread houses that led to my
first book for Greenwillow I first made in sticky variety at our
school. I have always liked to teach, and have taught art, cooking,
writing, and nature study, for nursery age on. "At forty-six, no
longer married, living in a houseboat on the bay at Vancouver,
British Columbia, I did my first book. But before that could
happen, the fates decreed a stint of cooking and running a bakery
at a small school in the Ontario countryside. My love affair with
Canada included also a 500-mile trip on the Yukon River. Many of
those adventures I put in Three Days on a River in a Red Canoe. "I
also write and draw for adults-short stories, leaflets, and
posters. As a lover of children, I try to do what I can to help
save their earth from nuclear disaster. This pursuit, too, has
added its excitement to my biography, including, in 1981, a month''s
stay in the federal penitentiary in Alderson, West Virginia an
outcome of a women''s peaceful blockade of the Pentagon. Perhaps
this experience will some day appear in one of my books. So far
I''ve found children''s books a wonderfully accommodating medium
where any of my various activities might pop up."