Award Announcement

Exciting news! LISTEN! ISRAEL'S ALL AROUND (Kar-Ben, Lerner Publishing) has been honored with PJ Library's Author Incentive Award! This award includes distribution of my book to the thousands of children who subscribe to PJ Library.

I received the news while sitting in the stacks of CSUN's Teacher Curriculum Center—a glorious library devoted to the best children's literature, as curated by teachers and librarians. At the moment the call came in, I was already on the floor (good thing), studying others' work and hoping to absorb a bit of their genius. More specifically, I was reading THE TUB PEOPLE by Pam Conrad and tearing up.

When Chris Barash, director of the PJ Library book selection committee, asked me, "Do you know where this gift comes from?" in reference to my writing ability, I felt like I was animating some parallel dimensional self who calmly sits before Charlie Rose and modestly shrugs about her "genius." When I hung up the phone, I snapped back into this dimension and felt my multiple selves (the one with the dream and the one realizing the dream) vibrate in a kind of bell tone for several seconds.

Moral: Picture books tell the truth—dreams do come true.