Thank you, Adirondack Center for Writing!

The magical and wonder-filled Adirondack Mountains are the setting for OVER AND UNDER THE SNOW, the picture book that I wrote and Christopher Silas Neal illustrated. So it was beyond exciting when our book won the Adirondack Literary Award for Children’s Literature in Blue Mountain Lake this weekend. And what a setting for the event!

View from the Blue Mountain Center

It was so much fun to hear about all the other award-winning titles, too. Best Fiction went to author Steven Millhauser for We Others:  New and Selected Stories, Best Memoir to Earth, Air, Fire, & Water by Jean Rikhoff.  An Elegant Wilderness: Great Camps and Grand Lodges of the Adirondacks by Gladys Montgomery won for Best Nonfiction. Best edited collection went to Heaven Up-h’isted-ness! The History of the Adirondack Forty-Sixers and the High Peaks of the Adirondacks edited by Suzanne Lance. The Best Book of Poetry went to Paul Pines for Reflections in a Smoking Mirror.  And the People’s Choice Award went to Questions  for the Sphinx  by Stuart Bartow.

One of my favorite parts of the day was listening to author, storyteller, and poet Joseph Bruchac read aloud from some of the nominated fiction and poetry. You know how some people are just amazing at reading aloud? He’s like that. I wish you could hear…

Toward the end of the event, I discovered that my husband and kids had…well…disappeared. I went looking for them down by the lake (always a good place to start with my family).  I found them in the boathouse playing ping pong and joined in for a game or two before it was time to go home.

Thanks, Adirondack Center for Writing and Blue Mountain Center, for a wonderful celebration of words and a magical clouds-in-the-water afternoon.