Swamp Angel

“Move over Paul Bunyan, you are about to meet Swamp Angel… . Visually exciting, wonderful to read aloud, this is a picture book to remember”.

– The Horn Book, starred review

Anne Isaacs

Anne Isaacs, author of the Caldecott Honor Book Swamp Angel, was born and raised in Buffalo, New York. She feels most at home in rural environments, such as the redwood forest near Santa Cruz, California, where she lives with her family. Her husband and three children have built their own treehouse, which they share with several squirrels and blue jays.

“All my life,” says Anne Isaacs, “poetry has affected me more than any other genre. I have read and memorized it, studied it, loved, and written it since I was nine.”

Early Influences and Childhood Dreams

“It’s a little surprising to me, when I think back over my childhood in suburban Chicago, and recall the things I liked and the things I did, that I never considered the possibility of becoming a book illustrator. During my elementary school years I was always collaborating with classmates to create imaginary worlds and the stories to take place in them and putting it all down in pictures.”

In the third grade, she drew bestiaries of ridiculous animals, detailing their habits and habitats. In fifth grade, her best friend and she, working through the mail, developed an island world of two competing countries, playfully named Igglebeania and Squigglebeania. These worlds teemed with colorful characters and important incidents. At fourteen, they wrote a novel about a monkey astronaut who saves the world from encroaching gorillas, with Anne providing the illustrations. Her friend’s father even sent their manuscript to publishers. Years later, while leafing through her friend’s scrapbook, Anne discovered a polite rejection letter from a publisher who had become a friend and with whom she had recently published two books.

The earliest books that were important to her, she recalls, seemed to have simply appeared in the library or her room, rather than being written or illustrated by anyone. The Color Kittens and The Tawny Scrawny Lion, among many others, filled her young childhood, and it was primarily the pictures she remembered.

Later, her book heroes were William Pene du Bois and Robert Lawson, whose works like The Twenty-One Balloons and The Fantastic Flight she particularly loved. It didn’t occur to her then that these writers were real people living in houses and doing everyday things. The realization that Robert Lawson had lived nearby while she was driving in Connecticut with friends years later was a profound moment. It seemed she still harbored the notion that he was merely a paragraph on a book jacket flap.

Now, Anne Isaacs muses, “I guess that I, too, am taking a place on the back flap of book jackets. What the children reading my books will make me out to be, if anything, I can’t guess. But it really doesn’t matter: it’s not the authors they should remember, it’s the books. (Or maybe, for the most part the pictures!)”

Paul Zelinsky

Paul Zelinsky is known for his versatility and does not feel his work represents a specific style. “I want the pictures to speak in the same voice as the words. This desire has led me to try various kinds of drawings in different books. I have used quite a wide stretch of styles, and I’m fortunate to have been asked to illustrate such a range of stories.”

Born in Evanston, Illinois, Paul Zelinsky attended Yale University. There, he took a course with Maurice Sendak, which later inspired him to pursue a career in children’s books. He went on to receive a graduate degree in painting from Tyler School of Art, with studies in both Philadelphia and Rome. Paul Zelinsky lives in New York with his wife, Deborah, and the younger of their two daughters.

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