Diane Stevenson – författare

A humorous and poignant collection of poetry for children of all ages in the vein of Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes and Edward Lear's nonsense poems.“Delightfully fun. . . . Small moments of contemplation elevate the book, making for a compilation that's both joyful and thoughtful." —Kirkus Reviews"Poets Geri Lipschultz, James Berger, and Diane Stevenson have collaborated on a lively book of children’s poetry titled Did You Kiss a Cat Today???. Here, a remarkable sort of nature figures prominently: the sky as a “blue-black bed”; a conversation between a tree and its leaves; “a lonely-looking owl / (sitting) alone on a limb”; flower-eating rhinos and mammal-chasing dinosaurs; even an ornery little walnut. It’s the natural world as seen through the lens of a child’s imagination: unruly, colorful, and full of contradiction.” - Tucker Coombe (Terrain.org)Written by three accomplished poets, Did You Kiss A Cat Today??? speaks to how smart children are and their sly sense of humor. This fresh anthology conjures a child's world with irrepressible freshness.Did You Kiss A Cat Today??? shows young people that everything can be a poem. Sometimes poems tell a story with made-up words, or they're short lines that beg to be read out loud. Poetry can be true and serious and fun, and that's the magic of this book.Perfect for a funny bedtime read aloud or as a class read along, Did You Kiss A Cat Today??? will delight children and adults alike. Includes stickers and space to write your own poems at the back of the book.

Each chapter in Thirteen Chapters tells a simple story of something simple that happens. In Chapter One, for example, a fish is invented, craves water, finds a river - as abbreviated as that. In Chapter Two grass is invented, then a bird, then a worm, then rain. Sometimes things happen in sequence, sometimes all at once: "There is a cat. There is a dog. The dog barks." An action can result in a chain reaction: a monkey smiles, a second monkey smiles, a third monkey smiles. Altogether, we delight in finding our intuitions confirmed, that wishing, thinking, doing are all connected. It's delightful that a fish exists, that it wishes for water, that it finds a river. Where is that fish? Where is the river the fish finds? How did he get there? These are questions for the reader to ask and answer. It's up to the reader to fill in the blanks. Connections, interjections, delight. Perhaps instead of the sparest of stories we might call these chapters the sparest of poems with illustrations to match the sparseness of the text.