Leslie Bulion
Children's Book Author

When I was a girl, I wrote lots of poetry. Some of it rhymed and some of it didn’t.

I read ALL the time when I was a girl, and I still do. Some of my favorite children's books are:

James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
A Cricket in Times Square by George Selden
The Black Cauldron by Lloyd Alexander
The Indian in the Cupboard by Lynn Reid Banks
Love That Dog by Sharon Creech
A Year Down Yonder by Richard Peck
More, More, More Said the Baby by Vera Williams

The last four books are books that I read when I was already a grown-up. I still read children's books all the time.

I am lucky to have many friends who write children's books. Their books are my favorites, too! If I wrote all of those down here,that would make a very, very long list, wouldn't it?

Three of my favorite adult books are:

Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver
Jim, the Boy by Tony Early
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

One of my new favorite books is The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak. It is a book for older children as well as adults.

I didn’t always know that I wanted to work as a writer. I didn’t study writing in college or in graduate school. I became a social worker and I worked with children and their families in hospitals and schools.

I studied Oceanography, too, but that’s another story. Or maybe I should say that's in another story, because I put everything I learn into the stories I write. Uncharted Waters is full of Oceanography!

I visited East Africa in 1998. I took hundreds of photgraphs, and wrote down all of my experiences in a journal. When I returned home, I put my photos in five albums, and read through all of my journal entries. I wanted to write a story about the red and yellow kanga cloth on the left-hand side of this page because I liked the saying "don't be fooled by the color, the good flavor of tea comes from the sugar." That’s why I wrote the book Fatuma’s New Cloth.

Although Fatuma’s New Cloth was my first published children’s book, I have been working as a writer for about ten years.

I’ve written lots of essays and articles for adults in magazines and on the internet.

Now I spend most of my time writing books and stories for children. I am working on other poetry books and several middle grade novels.

I share my writing with other children's writers, and they share their writing with me. We give each other helpful comments and suggestions about our stories and about our work as children's authors.

I have also written and edited books for a reading series that teachers can use in schools. I enjoy editing as much as writing!