Alexandra Day | |
---|---|
Born | Sandra Louise Woodward Darling April 27, 1941 Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S. |
Occupation | Writer/illustrator |
Genre | Children's picture books |
Notable works | Good Dog, Carl |
Website | |
gooddogcarl |
Alexandra Day (born 1941) is an American children's book author. Alexandra Day is a pseudonym; her real name is Sandra Louise Woodward Darling. [1] She is the author of Good Dog, Carl, which tells the story of a Rottweiler named Carl who looks after a baby named Madeleine. [2] The book was first published in 1985 by Day's own publishing company, Green Tiger Press. Good Dog, Carl has been followed by a whole series of popular Carl books, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Day was born in 1941 in Cincinnati, Ohio to a large and close-knit family. Painting was a popular family recreation, and almost every family excursion included one or more easels and a variety of sketch pads, chalks, paints, and pencils. For four years, the family lived on a hundred-acre farm in Kentucky. Here young Sandra grew especially fond of riding and training horses, and became a dog owner for the first time. Living in the country also provided plenty of time for reading, a life-long passion. [3]
She and her husband, Harold Darling, founded a publishing company, Green Tiger Press, in 1970. Meanwhile, Day began a career in illustration, and illustrated her first book in 1983: The Teddy Bears' Picnic, based on a popular children's song by Jimmy Kennedy. [4] In 1986 the Green Tiger was sold to Simon & Schuster and the Darlings started a book packaging company called Blue Lantern Publishing. In 1993, the Darlings moved to Seattle and founded a new publishing company, Laughing Elephant. Harold died in 2016 and Laughing Elephant is now run by Day and her children, Benjamin and Sacheverell. [5]
According to Day, the inspiration for Good Dog, Carl came from a trip to Zurich, Switzerland in 1983. Day and her husband saw in a bookshop window there a was looking an antique German picture sheet by the great German illustrator and pop-up artist, Lothar Meggndorfer, of a poodle playing with a baby who was supposed to be taking a nap. This image proved the inspiration for Good Dog, Carl. Day's own dog, a Rottweiler named Toby, was the model for the book's main character, and since then five other family Rottweilers have been models for the books. All of the dogs have had their own names: Arambarri, Zabala, Zubiaga, Zulaica and Abelard. Day's granddaughter, Madeleine was the inspiration and model for the baby in the original Carl book. [6]
Carl's Christmas was a New York Times bestseller. [7]
Beside the "Carl" series, Day created the Frank and Ernest series of books featuring a bear and an elephant who engage in the colorful language of diners, CBers and baseball.
Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and short-story writer. She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award winner in 1970, and the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976. Dwight Garner argued in 2018 that she was perhaps "the most purely gifted poet of the 20th century".
The Rottweiler is a breed of domestic dog, regarded as medium-to-large or large. The dogs were known in German as Rottweiler Metzgerhund, meaning Rottweil butchers' dogs, because their main use was to herd livestock and pull carts laden with butchered meat to market. This continued until the mid-19th century when railways replaced droving. Although still used to herd stock in many parts of the world, Rottweilers are now also used as search and rescue dogs, guard dogs, and police dogs.
Alice McDermott is an American writer and university professor. For her 1998 novel Charming Billy she won an American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
Carl's Afternoon in the Park (ISBN 0-374-31104-8) is a children's picture book by Alexandra Day. The book was copyrighted in 1991. The book is largely pictorial with text only on the very first and very last pages.
Good Dog, Carl is the eponymous name of the first of a series of children's picture books written and illustrated by Alexandra Day centering on a Rottweiler named Carl and a little girl named Madeleine, of whom he takes care. All of the books are mostly wordless, relying on the details of the illustrations to tell the stories. Good Dog, Carl was published in 1985 and has been continually in print since that date. There have been fourteen "Carl" titles after the first. All but the first have been published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The board book versions of these stories are particularly popular. In addition to the children and Rottweiler fanciers who have enjoyed them, the books have been found useful in teaching English as a second language, with Alzheimer's patients, and with children who are having difficulty learning to read.
Charles Kenneth "C. K." Williams was an American poet, critic and translator. Williams won many poetry awards. Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987. Repair (1999) won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was a National Book Award finalist and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The Singing won the 2003 National Book Award and Williams received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2005. The 2012 film The Color of Time relates aspects of Williams' life using his poetry.
Littlest Pet Shop is a toy franchise and cartoon series owned by Hasbro and currently under license with Basic Fun!. The original toy series was produced by Kenner in the early 1990s. An animated television series was made in 1995 by Sunbow Productions and Jean Chalopin Creativite et Developpement, based on the franchise.
Colin McNaughton is a British writer and illustrator of over seventy children's books. He is also a poet, focusing mainly on humorous children's poetry. He trained in graphic design at the Central School of Art and Design in London followed by an MA in illustration at the Royal College of Art. He lives in London.
Carl Phillips is an American writer and poet. He is a Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2023, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020.
A Dog's Life: The Autobiography of a Stray is a children's novel written in 2005 by Ann M. Martin and is published by Scholastic Books. The target audience for this book is grades 4–7. It is written from the first-person perspective of a female stray dog named Squirrel. Ann M. Martin bases her books on personal experiences and contemporary problems or events.
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas is an American author. She has published fiction and non-fiction books and articles on animal behavior, Paleolithic life, and the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert.
Janet McDonald was an American writer of young adult novels as well as the author of Project Girl, a memoir about her early life in Brooklyn's Farragut Houses and struggle to achieve an Ivy League education. Her best known children's book is Spellbound, which tells the story of a teenaged mother who wins a spelling competition and a college scholarship. The book was named as one of the American Library Association's eighty-four Best Books for Young Adults in 2002.
Phillip M. Hoose is an American writer of books, essays, stories, songs, and articles. His first published works were written for adults, but he turned his attention to children and young adults to keep up with his daughters. His work has been well received and honored more than once by the children's literature community. He won the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, Nonfiction, for The Race to Save the Lord God Bird (2004), and the National Book Award, Young People's Literature, for Claudette Colvin (2009).
Cooper Edens is an author and illustrator of more than 25 children's books..[1] He's best known for "If You're Afraid of the Dark, Remember the Night Rainbow" and "Add One More Star to the Night". These works reflect his "horizontal" approach to storytelling. that asks the reader to solve a non-linear string of "problems" rather than follow a hero or heroine through a linear progression of plot points He has also collaborated with other artists on a number of children's books and in compilations of classic children's story illustrations.
Kate Banks is an American children's writer who lives in France.
Deborah Diesen is an American children's book author. Her book The Pout-Pout Fish was chosen by Time magazine as a Top 10 Children's Book of 2008. It was also selected for the Michigan Reads! literacy program.
Claudia Jane Mills is an American author of children's books. She is also an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Bruce McMillan is a contemporary American author of children books, photo-illustrator and watercolor artist living in Shapleigh, Maine. Born in Massachusetts, he grew up in Bangor, and Kennebunk, Maine. He received a degree in biology from the University of Maine. In addition to his 45 children's books, seven of them set in Iceland, he has authored two books of humor, Punography, featured in Life magazine, and Punography Too. His interest in biology is often reflected in his books' topics. He has published three genres of children's picture books - concept books, nonfiction, and fiction. In 2006, he was honored by the Maine Library Association with the Katahdin Award honoring his outstanding body of work of children's literature in Maine.
Kelly DiPucchio is an American writer of children's books. DiPucchio was born in Warren, Michigan. She attended Michigan State University where she graduated in 1989 in child psychology and development. She currently lives in Detroit, Michigan. Her books have made the New York Times bestseller list.
Green Tiger Press was an American publishing company known for producing reproductions of illustrations from old children's books and creating children's and gift books. The company was founded by Harold and Sandra Darling in the mid-1960s.