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Alice Schertle - Click to see all titles by this author.

“I write children’s books because I love them—children and books. Always have. The various seasons of my childhood are identified in my memory with the books I treasured.”

Alice Schertle is an award-winning poet and author of many well-loved books for children. She was born and raised in Los Angeles where she attended the University of Southern California and later studied with acclaimed poet Myra Cohn Livingston. Alice taught elementary school and has authored more than eighty picture books and collections of poetry. She has been honored with many notable awards including the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award and the Christopher Award.

Alice’s poems explore nature, childhood, and language. She loves the challenge of using traditional forms such as villanelle, triolet and haiku, and enjoys writing free verse and prose as well. But when she writes for the very youngest, as in the beloved Little Blue Truck books, she gathers her listeners with easy rhythm and playful rhyme. “Rhyme and rhythm take children by the hand and just swing them along,” she says. “And they make lines and verses so easy to remember—as any parent who tries to skip a page can attest.”

When her own three children were young, Alice says they gave her many good story ideas. They once persuaded her to join them in their three-plank treehouse. She scrambled up into the big jacaranda and discovered a tree is a very good place in which to generate ideas; it later inspired a scene in her picture book Down the Road.

When she first moved from CA to New England, Alice says her first reaction was, “Seasons! How long has this been going on?” Nowadays she spends a good deal of time wandering the woods that surround her home in western Massachusetts, a place, she says, where “poems whisper through the trees and flow in the streams.” Alice says she often leaves the woods after a long tramp with verses moving through her mind, ready to send Little Blue Truck on a new adventure.

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