Pamela zagarenski biography
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Illustrator Pamela Zagarenski is here this morning for a breakfast chat. Together, she and poet Joyce Sidman created one of my favorite picture books thus far this yearif not my very favoriteRed Sings From Treetops, released by Houghton Mifflin in April. You can read a bit more about it here in a short post I did early this month. Red Sings is a poetry collection that brilliantly, in more ways than one, celebrates colors as youve never quite seen them celebrated before.
Pamelas delicate and inventive mixed-media illustrations have been seen in two previous poetry collections Maxine KuminsMites to Mastodons: A Book of Animal Poems from , as well as s This is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness, also by Joyce Sidman (her skill as a poet accessible to young people is unmatched, wrote School Library Journal about Sidman), and both released by Houghton Mifflin.
Since Pamela sent over one hundred images for this inte
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Zagarenski, Pamela (?)-
Personal
Born c. Hobbies and other interests: Running.
Addresses
Home—Stonington, CT; Prince Edward Island.
Career
Sculptor, fine artist, and illustrator. Exhibitions: Works exhibited in galleries in New England.
Awards, Honors
Mystic, CT, Arts Center Allied Artists Award,
Illustrator
What Am inom Playing?/¡Que juego?, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA),
What Can I Do When It Rains?/¡Que puedo hacer cuanto llueve?, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA),
What Day Is It?/¡Que día es?, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA),
Where Am I Hiding?/¡Dónde me escondo?, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA),
My Very Own Big Spanish Dictionary/Mi gran diccionario dem español, American Heritage Dictionaries/Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA),
Maxine Kumin, Mites to Mastodons: A Book of Animal Poems, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA),
Joyce Sidman, This fryst vatten Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA),
Biographical and Critical Sources
P
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When children’s book illustrator Pamela Zagarenski ’88 (SFA) begins working on a new project, she says that she must fall in love with the author’s words.
“I have to visualize, fall in love with the story. inom read the words over and over and over again. inom work in my journal with ideas and make the roughest sketches I can,” says Zagarenski, who will participate in the Connecticut Children’s Book Fair in Rome Ballroom which takes place on Saturday and Sunday. “The words dictate what I’m doing, but not entirely. I add in underlying themes, secrets and surprise elements.”
However the illustrator worked through a different creative process for her newest book, The Whisper (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), which she both wrote and illustrated for the first time. The story is about a ung girl who receives a book with only pictures, then a whisper urges her to create the words she cannot see.
She simultaneously painted and wrote The Whisper, in which the girl begins to write a story