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James Cross Giblin
What is your connection to Ohio?
I was born in Cleveland in 1933 and lived there with my parents for a year until we moved to Painesville, where my father had his law practice. (My mother had been a French teacher at Shaw High School in East Cleveland before her marriage.) I grew up in Painesville, graduated from Harvey High School there in 1951, and continued to live in Painesville while I attended Case Western Reserve University, from which I received my B.A. degree in 1954. At that point I moved to New York City to get an M. A. at Columbia and I've lived in New York ever since.
What inspired you to become an author or illustrator?
For over twenty years from 1959 until 1980, I was a full-time children's book editor starting out as an associate editor at Lothrop, Lee & Shepard and ending as editor-in-chief of Clarion Books. That experience, working on everything from picture books for young children, to informational books for middle-grade readers, to novels for young adults, inspired me to want to write children's books of my own. My first,The Scarecrow Book, was published in 1980 and I've gone on to write twenty-two more. At the same time I've continued as a contributing editor at Clarion, working with a number of my long-time authors and illustrators.
What advice do you have for a young author or illustrator?
My advice to aspiring young authors is to keep a diary or journal in which you record the events in your everyday life. Try to capture the flavor of what happened and how you felt about it through vivid descriptions and fresh turns of phrase. Writing a journal for an author is like exercising for an athlete. It helps you to keep limber and in shape so that you'll be ready when called on to write a term paper or short story, or to take part in an athletic event.
What do you like to do for fun?
For fun, I like to read, go to movies, plays, and museums, and explore New York City. (It may seem hard to believe, since I've lived in New York all of my adult life, but there are many parts of the city that I have yet to visit.
Some of your most popular books are:
- Century that Was: Reflections on the Last One Hundred Years (2000)
- Mystery of the Mammoth Bones and How it Was Solved (2000)
- Amazing Life of Benjamin Franklin (2000)
- Writing Books for Young People (1998)
- When Plague Strikes: the Black Death, Smallpox, AIDS (1997)
- Charles A. Lindbergh: a Human Hero (1997)
- Thomas Jefferson: a Picture Book Biography (1996)
- The Dwarf, the Giant, and the Unicorn: a Tale of King Arthur (1996)
- The Truth About Unicorns (1996)
- Edith Wilson: the Woman who ran the United States (1993)
