Caroline Arnold, the 2005 winner of The Washington Post-Children's Book Guild Nonfiction award, is the author of 130 books for children. Yet she started out thinking she would be an illustrator of children's books. She had studied art as an undergraduate and graduate student, and worked a number of years as an artist and art teacher. But when her first children's book was accepted for publication, the editor wanted someone better known to do the illustrations. And in time Arnold came to realize that she actually preferred the writing process to illustrating.

   Her decision was reinforced when she began collaborating with a professional photographer named Richard Hewett, the husband of a woman she met in a writing class at the University of California, Los Angeles, extension program. Arnold researched and wrote the text, while Hewett photographed the animals. Together, they created more than 50 books about such animals as pandas, lions, foxes, bats, and killer whales.

   When Hewett retired, Arnold found herself "coming full circle," as she is now doing some of her own illustrations again. In other cases, her books are illustrated by Laurie Caple. The advantage of having illustrations, as opposed to photographs, according to Arnold, is that she can now deal with topics that don't lend themselves to being photographed. For example, if you are writing about dinosaurs or pterosaurs, "unless you can time travel there is nothing to photograph."

   Also, as she aims at younger readers (kindergarten through third grade), she wants to do shorter books that show the animals as they live and play naturally in the wild, as opposed to how they live in nature parks or in zoos. It is far easier, for example, to draw penguins playing and swimming underwater, than it would be to photograph them engaging in such activities.

   When she worked with photographer Hewett, there was a close collaboration, Arnold said. "We argued so much people thought we were married," she joked. But "creativity came out of the conflicts," and once the conflicts were resolved, they ultimately led to a better book. When Arnold's books are being illustrated by a professional artist, she doesn't work with the illustrator. The illustrator receives the text and then works with the editor, rather than with the writer.

   Because of her longstanding love of animals and the outdoor life, Arnold was drawn to subjects involving nature and animals. She believes that her interest began in childhood. Until the age of 10, Arnold lived with her family in a Minneapolis settlement house (both parents were social workers). Her summers were spent at the settlement house's summer camp in northern Wisconsin, where she had the opportunity to spend a lot of time outside and observe nature.

   Another reason for her interest, Arnold reflects, is her marriage to a man who, though currently working as a neuroscientist, was trained as a biologist. So she had "a lot of exposure to biologists and people who studied wild animals."

   Arnold isn't worried about running out of new animals to write about. She selects animals that she is interested in learning more about, and those that children are most interested in. When she does school visits, at the end of her talks, hands shoot up and kids ask her, why don't you do a book about a ___ and that's where she gets many of her ideas. "Dinosaurs never go out of style," she notes.

   Arnold teaches a course on writing nonfiction for children in the same program where she used to study: the University of California's Los Angeles extension program. While she does write the occasional fiction book -- The Terrible Hodag and the Animal Catchers (a sequel to a book of fiction she wrote back in 1989) will be published by Boyds Mill Press in the spring -- Arnold has found that placing nonfiction with the right publisher is easier, and "just as creative as fiction, but in different ways." Arnold tells her students that many fictional techniques can be used in writing nonfiction, such as storytelling, conversation/dialogue, and humor.

   So while Arnold still enjoys drawing, and loves the visual additions made to her books by photographers and illustrators, she has indeed found her calling as a writer of nonfiction.