Today, I found this article from the Morgan Messenger (Berkeley Springs' newspaper) from this time 9 years ago!  It's about the time I visited Warm Springs Intermediate School to do a fun essay writing workshop with fourth graders.  Here are some highlights from the article that can give you some insights about my history and my own writing process.

Inspired by meeting an author
Smucker was first inspired to write children's books after meeting children's author Cynthia Rylant, who wrote When I Was Young in the Mountains.  She was working as a children's librarian at the time and realized that there were no books that reflected her growing up in a steel town (Weirton).
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"So many mills were closing.  People had to move away to find work.  I wanted to remember everything I could," said Smucker.  As her father's memory of those days was failing and that way of life was vanishing.  Smucker captured a steel town from a young girl's eyes in her book - from the eerie night glow of the mill's smokestacks to the mountainous slag hill they played on.

Award-winning books
Smucker's award winning children's book No Star Nights is about her memories of growing up in the steel town of Weirton during the 1950s.  The books has won the International Reading Association's Children's Book Award, the ALA's Notable Book Award, and the WV Library Association Literary Merit Award.  It also received the Junior Library Guild Section Award in the field of social studies.  

Smucker authored A History of West Virginia, which was originally written for beginning adult readers.  It was republished in 2004 in a new edition for ages 10 through adult.  She also wrote a children's bedtime story, Outside the Window, and has a new historical fiction novel for children called To Keep the South Manitou Light that is set on a Lake Michigan island, which just received an award from the Michigan Historical Society.

If you can't view the image below, click through to this link to see how I worked with the class and about my advice to young and beginning writers.  Enjoy!

The publisher of my most recent book, Eerdman's, featured a super article on Amanda Hall - the incredible illustrator of Brother Giovanni's Little Reward:  How the Pretzel Was Born.

Here's a taste from the article:
"For example, Brother Giovanni’s Little Reward: How the Pretzel Was Born -- my new book for Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, written by Anna Egan Smucker — takes place in medieval Europe, most likely in Italy (I thought — with a name like Giovanni!). I already had a wonderful store of memories from visiting Italy as a child. These impressions added to my imaginative mix: fabulous old churches, clanking bells, the smell of warm Cyprus trees, wonderful food, a particular memory of having the top of my six-year-old head kissed by a kind adult, just because I was a ‘bambina.’
I started to hunt out art from medieval Italy. I have always loved pre-Renaissance Italian paintings, with their early sense of perspective, decorative plants, and buildings with the front walls opened up like dolls’ houses so that you can see right in. Having enjoyed playing with scale when I worked on The Fantastic Jungles of Henri Rousseau, I responded to the fantastical sizes of things in these early Italian paintings too. I was particularly drawn to the paintings of Fra Angelico for many reasons — their clarity and detail and their joyful coloration as well as the architectural structures the artist conjured. The scenes Angelico painted were often intimate in scale, even when he was dealing with epic subject matter. Like other painters of that era, he also worked on illuminated manuscripts. I thought I could have fun using those kinds of visual devices for Brother Giovanni."

Check out the whole article here.