Pamela zagarenski biography

When children’s book illustrator Pamela Zagarenski ’88 (SFA) begins working on a new project, she says that she must fall in love with the author’s words.

“I have to visualize, fall in love with the story. I read the words over and over and over again. I work in my journal with ideas and make the roughest sketches I can,” says Zagarenski, who will participate in the Connecticut Children’s Book Fair in Rome Ballroom which takes place on Saturday and Sunday. “The words dictate what I’m doing, but not entirely. I add in underlying themes, secrets and surprise elements.”

However the illustrator worked through a different creative process for her newest book, The Whisper (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), which she both wrote and illustrated for the first time. The story is about a young girl who receives a book with only pictures, then a whisper urges her to create the words she cannot see.

She simultaneously painted and wrote The Whisper, in which the girl begins to write a story

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Illustrator Pamela Zagarenski is here this morning for a breakfast chat. Together, she and poet Joyce Sidman created one of my favorite picture books thus far this year&#;if not my very favorite&#;Red Sings From Treetops, released by Houghton Mifflin in April. You can read a bit more about it here &#; in a short post I did early this month. Red Sings is a poetry collection that brilliantly, in more ways than one, celebrates colors as you&#;ve never quite seen them celebrated before.

Pamela&#;s delicate and inventive mixed-media illustrations have been seen in two previous poetry collections &#; Maxine Kumin&#;sMites to Mastodons: A Book of Animal Poems from , as well as &#;s This is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness, also by Joyce Sidman (&#;her skill as a poet accessible to young people is unmatched,&#; wrote School Library Journal about Sidman), and both released by Houghton Mifflin.

Since Pamela sent over one hundred images for this inte

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Ancient Wisdom for Trying Times. An Interview with the Duo Behind The Fabled Life of Aesop

I am a greedy gus.

Not long ago (though it feels like a million years ago since the Coronavirus spread) inom received a very nice offer. Would I, at all consider, hosting a conversation between the creators of The Fabled Life of Aesop (HMH BFYR, 3/10)? Author Ian Lendler and two-time Caldecott Honor recipient Pamela Zagarenski would discuss this remarkablebook. The description reads:

&#;The Fabled Life of Aesop is the first picture book biography of Aesop – his fables are “some of the oldest stories in human existence,” as Ian puts it, but so much less is known about Aesop himself. At 64 pages, this long-format picture book combines a biography of Aesop with retellings of several of his fables, while giving Pamela’s mixed-media artwork lots of room to shine. And given that the book highlights how Aesop’s circumstances, having been born into slavery, informed these fables, it really le