DyAnne DiSalvo has been published for more than 30 years. This author-illustrator hasn’t stopped having fun in the process.

DyAnne, what’s good right now in children’s literature?

That’s a hard question. Did everybody get that question? Let me distract you with a story: When I first began illustrating children’s books, Maurice Sendak rocked my world. He sparked the pencil and ink line of my drawings, the movement on my page, the color and characters and neighborhood influence that inspired me to create my own world of literature and picture book art. The same magic of the Brooklyn sidewalks that gave us Really Rosie and the overbearing relatives that lovingly haunted us in Where the Wild Things Are fed me and satisfied me like “chicken soup with rice.” I slurped down books by Mercer Mayer, Arnold Lobel, Tomie dePaolo, Vera Williams and Patricia Polacco. These are the great illustrators and authors (for me, anyway) that paved the way with gritty, concrete, lively, and compelling picture books.

I’m a city girl with a fast-paced life of travel and work and (did I mention that I toured for the past 12 years as the rhythm guitar player for the pop-rock band Smash Palace?) when it comes to a children’s book, I want to sit down and linger on each word that is written. I want to imagine the author typing the sentence as I read it. I want to be transformed into the life of the main character and recognize the pictures as something brand new, yet familiar. I want to eat the whole book, one bite at a time and feel satisfied when I am done. I don’t want to be distracted by too much color or too many words or too much glitter or so many sparkles that I feel I am being suckered into liking something just because everyone else seems to like it. What’s good right now in children’s books? Let’s just say, ‘when I cracked open this year’s Caldecott winner, A Sick Day for Amos McGee by Phillip C. Stead and Erin Stead, I ate it, burped, and happily went “straight to bed—cakefree and dried.”

What can make that “good” better?

Sorry, I’m busy writing!

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Learn more at www.Dyannedisalvo.com.