Nancy Shaw - Children's Author

Cover reproduced by arrangement with Henry
Holt and Company. All rights reserved.

Hop on board!

Cover reproduced with permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

The sheep have hopped into new board-book versions of their adventures. Sheep in a Jeep and Sheep on a Ship now come with craft activities in small board books. Sheep in a Jeep also comes as a lap edition, a large-format board book.

Click here for a conversation with WOW! Women on Writing about writing picture books.

Click here for Raccoon Tune activities from the Library of Michigan.

Raccoons in the Spotlight

I'm so pleased that Raccoon Tune was chosen as the 2008 Michigan Reads! children's book!
I enjoyed visiting libraries around the state to tell the story. I've read a lot about how important early reading and conversation are to children's development. Michigan's program is about actively engaging young children to enjoy reading. Look here for more about the program. The 2010 book is The Runaway Garden.

It took 18 years to finish Raccoon Tune! I thought I had a good idea, but I got stuck. I put it away for so long I couldn't remember the main point of the plot. After a while, I worked it out. A tune kept going through my head as I tried to get the rhymes arranged.

When it was published, Howard Fine's moonlit pictures added to the adventure. Then something more happened--the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra commissioned Joshua Penman to write a concert piece based on my book, and his music is much more complex than my tune. The piece, narrated by Amir Levi, brought trash-can-lid percussion and a variety of musical styles to a family concert--to rousing applause.