Why do I write for children and young adults? Well, I guess it started with my seven-year-old. I had written quite a few books of love poems. I found it very difficult to get dates as it were in college. Like I wasn’t very cool. I didn’t get cool ’til recently. So, I would write poems and that’s how I would communicate with these girls in college that I liked.
So I spent the first 10 years of my writerly life writing love poems and sort of learning how to write love poems, reading Pablo Nerudo and then, you know, as it happens, I got married and had a daughter and my daughter wanted to be read to and I wanted to read to her. And we found ourselves reading three to four books a night and I became immersed in children’s literature.
And so I found that some of the poems that I began writing were now love poems to my daughter. And so children’s literature became something that, you know, my daughter is ultimately responsible for why I write it now, and I think it was sort of the best career move I could have made and certainly the most rewarding part of my writing career that I’ve had.
