 Rosanne Parry grew up in Oregon loving its rainy days, wild places, and many libraries. She is the author of seven novels for young readers, including the NY Times best sellers A Wolf Called Wander and A Whale of the Wild which have been translated into more than 14 languages. Her first picture book is Big Truck Day! Her next novel will be A Horse Called Sky. Look for it in the fall of 2023. Rosanne is a bookseller at legendary bookstore, Annie Blooms. She lives with her family in an old farmhouse in Portland and writes in a treehouse in her backyard. Ten things to know about Rosanne Parry: 1. I was born in Oak Park, IL and lived just a mile or so from the childhood home of the author Ernest Hemingway. His house is more than twice and big as the one I lived in when I was little but mine is closer to Longfellow Park which was my favorite place to play. I moved away from Oak Park when I was five. 2. I grew up in Portland, Oregon where I live now with my family in a farm house that is more than 100 years old. Sometimes I have chickens and sometimes I have rabbits and always I have a very weedy garden. My summer office is in a fir tree. I have many cherry, plum, and pear trees, a walnut tree, an apple tree and a very peculiar-looking peach tree. 3. I have also lived in Spokane, WA, Taholah, WA, Ft Huachuca, AZ, Aschaffenburg, Germany, and Ft Hood, TX. I have visited all but 8 of the states in America so I’m definitely looking for an excuse to visit North Dakota, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and Maine. 4. My favorite job, besides writing, was being a summer camp counselor. I worked at Camp Howard which is on the slope of Mt. Hood. I still go camping there every year if I can. Here is a view of Mt Hood from Trillium Lake. 5. I can play the violin, and I can juggle, and I am learning to play the harp, but I cannot throw a frisbee to save my life. 6. My grandfather lived with my family when I was growing up. He was born in Berlin. He immigrated to this country when he was a teenager in 1905, and he lived to be 96 years old. 7. I have a brother and a sister who are twins, four children who are not twins and more than thirty nieces and nephews. Mark Twain said, “A man with a big family stands a broader mark for sorrow, but he stands a broader mark for joy as well.” I have found that to be true. 8. Research is one of my favorite things about writing. Sometimes I research in the library but sometimes I research while camping in the mountains or canoeing on rivers and lakes. I go to museums. I go looking for whales in a kayak. I take pictures of plants and animals and listen to birds and the sound of the wind. I swim in the ocean and listen to people sing and learn how to dance. And best of all, I talk to interesting people from all over the world. 9. When I am not writing, I like to ride my bike, hike, make music, climb trees, dance, go to the beach or the mountains, and read books. 10. Lots of really great children’s authors and illustrators live in Portland. My favorite thing about being a children’s writer is the friends I have made. These are some writers I know from Portland: Susan Blackaby, Carmen Bernier-Grand, Carolyn Digby Conahan, Virginia Euwer Wolff, Trudy Ludwig, Susan Hill Long, Fonda Lee, Heidi Schultz, Barry Deutsch, Emily Whitman, Susan Fletcher, Emily Winfield Martin, Graham Salisbury, Laini Taylor, Dylan Meconis, Kim Johnson, and Heather Vogel-Frederick. I hope you read and enjoy their books too. Content and image source from: Goodreads and Rosanne Parry's website.  Joe Sacco was born in Malta on October 2, 1960. At the age of one, he moved with his family to Australia, where he spent his childhood until 1972, when they moved to Los Angeles. He began his journalism career working on the Sunset High School newspaper in Beaverton, Oregon. While journalism was his primary focus, this was also the period of time in which he developed his penchant for humor and satire. He graduated from Sunset High in 1978.
Sacco earned his B.A. in journalism from the University of Oregon in 1981 in three years. He was greatly frustrated with the journalist work that he found at the time, later saying, "[I couldn't find] a job writing very hard-hitting, interesting pieces that would really make some sort of difference." After being briefly employed by the journal of the National Notary Association, a job which he found "exceedingly, exceedingly boring," and several factories, he returned to Malta, his journalist hopes forgotten. "...I sort of decided to forget it and just go the other route, which was basically take my hobby, which has been cartooning, and see if I could make a living out of that," he later told the BBC. He began working for a local publisher writing guidebooks. Returning to his fondness for comics, he wrote a Maltese romance comic named Imħabba Vera ("True Love"), one of the first art-comics in the Maltese language. "Because Malta has no history of comics, comics weren't considered something for kids," he told Village Voice. "In one case, for example, the girl got pregnant and she went to Holland for an abortion. Malta is a Catholic country where not even divorce is allowed. It was unusual, but it's not like anyone raised a stink about it, because they had no way of judging whether this was appropriate material for comics or not." Eventually returning to the United States, by 1985 Sacco had founded a satirical, alternative comics magazine called Portland Permanent Press in Portland, Oregon. When the magazine folded fifteen months later, he took a job at The Comics Journal as the staff news writer. This job provided the opportunity for him to create another satire: the comic Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy, a name he took from an overly-complicated children's toy in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. But Sacco was more interested in travelling. In 1988, he left the U.S. again to travel across Europe, a trip which he chronicled in his autobiographical comic Yahoo. The trip lead him towards the ongoing Gulf War (his obsession with which he talks about in Yahoo #2), and in 1991 he found himself nearby to research the work he would eventually publish as Palestine. The Gulf War segment of Yahoo drew Sacco into a study of Middle Eastern politics, and he traveled to Israel and the Palestinian territories to research his first long work. Palestine was a collection of short and long pieces, some depicting Sacco's travels and encounters with Palestinians (and several Israelis), and some dramatizing the stories he was told. It was serialized as a comic book from 1993 to 2001 and then published in several collections, the first of which won an American Book Award in 1996. Sacco next travelled to Sarajevo and Goražde near the end of the Bosnian War, and produced a series of reports in the same style as Palestine: the comics Safe Area Goražde, The Fixer, and the stories collected in War's End; the financing for which was aided by his winning of the Guggenheim Fellowship in April 2001. Safe Area Goražde won the Eisner Award for Best Original Graphic Novel in 2001. He has also contributed short pieces of graphic reportage to a variety of magazines, on subjects ranging from war crimes to blues, and is a frequent illustrator of Harvey Pekar's American Splendor. Sacco currently lives in Portland. Content and source image: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/32468.Joe_Sacco |
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