My first job, on Life magazine, sent me with photographers to interview sea turtles, Marines, oldtime jazz musicians. Later I wrote stories for magazines and newspapers--including lots about kids. Then I knew I wanted to write for kids. I wrote Museum People, to celebrate Smithsonian folk who happily hang airplanes from ceilings and collect First Lady dresses and election souvenirs.

Finding the shape of a book and sticking to a game plan of chapters is hard for me, especially when it means throwing out nine tenths of what I long to include.

Auks, Rocks and the Odd Dinosaur focuses each chapter on one item at the Natural History Museum and tells how it was found or fixed or the history to be read from it--from a bone, a stone, or the tooth of a house mouse. Readers like the cockroaches and guard dog Max. And this book won the 1986 Boston Globe / Horn Book award for the best nonfiction book for children. A museum has never seemed more human -Kirkus

Keepers and Creatures at the National Zoo, used a lot in classrooms, has chapters on giving elephant baths, on training sea lions (to challenge them and keep them safe too), on teaching sign language to an orangutan. Keepers at work are keen observers, loving caregivers. They cope with complex emotions and with mess.

City Kids in China is described in NY Times as: a delightful sketchbook account of children living in Changsha with chapters about reading lessons (including eye exercises), brush painting, one-child families, cooking and chopsticks. ALA Booklist calls it a book to energize social studies with this look at a place alive with open-air markets, bicyclists chingchinging their bells--with children's own comments that add a marvelous sense of "you-are-there." A boy writes of his bike: he is beautiful but sometimes he is sick. A girl, on cooking: it is hot and dangerous.

Siggy's Spaghetti Works, with Gloria Kamen's lively drawings, features tons of pasta in the making and includes Marco Polo, Chinese chefs, and macaroni-eater Thomas Jefferson. Five Owls says: For children with an insatiable curiosity for how things are made combined with a hearty appetite for pasta....a wonderful book chock full of interesting facts, mysterious Italian names, vignettes from history. School Library Journal: A playful introduction to one of the world's oldest foods.

Digital image © 1997 National Gallery of Art, Washington, to be used for non-commercial personal and private use only. Any other use, including publication, copying or redistribution, of this Gallery digital image in any manner is prohibited without prior written permission from the National Gallery of Art.

invites kids to Tullahoma, Tennessee where Hank shows how you whittle wood billets and squeeze aluminum tubes into bats and how you stitch covers onto the balls those bats will whack. Woven in are pages of quirky bat-and-ball trivia relating to best-loved batters and pitchers; scraps of baseball's history, too, including the origins of the seventh-inning stretch and the stats on Mark McGwire's homerun streak (you bring those numbers up to date!). According to Children's Literature Newsletter: A good catch!

On school visits to talk about research and how an interview is not a quiz, I like to tell the stories and show the waterbuffalo too that never made it into print. I like the chance to show how a book is part of the larger adventure of its making.

Orangutans the book now in progress, is about the orangutans who are so eagerly taking part in a language project at the National Zoo.

For classroom support, find help with a teaching guide for Katie Henio: Navajo Sheepherder.