Jane Yolen
By Lee Bennett Hopkins

Jane Yolen was born on February 11, l939, in New York City. She says, "I think I was born breathing poetry. I bet I babbled in rhyme. Mother recited nursery rhymes to my brother and me; father sang us cowboy songs. Cowboy songs in New York City! Go figure! Interestingly enough that combination stuck with me. I can recite and sing to this day."

Jane's enormous body of work for children and adults includes fiction and nonfiction. Newsweek magazine dubbed her a "writing dynamo." And that she is. With well over 250 books to her credit her writing career continues to soar.

The space between wing beats
Jane is well-known for such popular books as Caldecott Award winner Owl Moon (Philomel, l987, ISBN: 0-399-21457-7), The Devil's Arithmetic (Penguin, 1988, ISBN: 0-670-81027-4), a novel about the Holocaust that was later made into a TV movie and her very popular How Do Dinosaurs… series (Blue Sky Press). She also loves writing poetry, a venture that began in the l980s. She has since written close to 30 books of original poetry and anthologies for readers of all ages.

Her latest collection, Count Me a Rhyme (Wordsong, 2006, ISBN: 1-590-78345-X), a companion to Color Me a Rhyme (Boyds Mills Press, 2000, ISBN: 1-563-97892-X), is her ninth collaboration with her son, Jason Stemple, a freelance photographer. Jason's full-color nature photographs are the impetus for these books, all of which follow a similar format. Water Music (Boyds Mills Press, l995, ISBN: 1-563-97336-7), for example, contains l7 tightly composed verses based on water in its different forms from an "Icicle" – "There/is/no/rhyme/for/frozen/time./It/is/itself/a/poem – to "Water Music" where "…many melodies…with perfect pitch" are heard.

"I think of poetry as the soul of literature," Jane says. "It is what we see and hear the moment before sleep takes us. It is the space between wing beats, the pause between heartbeats."

A recipe for writing
The mother of three grown children, Jane lives with her husband, David Stemple, in a l9th-century farmhouse in Hatfield, MA, and in a l9th-century home in St. Andrews, Scotland. "Another home I live in," she says, "is the home of my childhood. Three homes. Three landscapes plus imagination. It is my own recipe for writing."

For more information on Jane Yolen's life and work, be sure to visit her website, www.janeyolen.com

Lee Bennett Hopkins is a distinguished poet and anthologist. Recent collections include Got Geography! (Greenwillow, 2006).