Amazing. Thanks for the post, rave! "If all the world's a stage and all the people merely players, who in bloody hell hired the director?" -- Charles L Grant
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQUxw9aUVik To: scifinoir2@yahoogroups.com From: ravena...@yahoo.com Date: Sun, 7 Feb 2010 22:42:49 +0000 Subject: [scifinoir2] For Jerry Pinkney's bunch, books bind a literary dynasty http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2010-02-04-pinkney04_CV_N.htm By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY CROTON-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — As a child in an all-black Philadelphia neighborhood, Jerry Pinkney loved to draw and paint. But, he says, "I didn't have the slightest clue that anyone could make a living doing that." At 70, Pinkney is the writer and illustrator of more than 100 books, most of them for children, many of them about African-American history. He also is the patriarch of the first family of children's literature. His family's name is on the covers of about 175 books. Jerry's wife, Gloria Jean Pinkney, also is an author. Their oldest son, Brian, writes and illustrates. Brian's wife, Andrea Davis Pinkney, is a novelist and editor at Scholastic Books. Brian's younger brother, Myles, a photographer, collaborates with his wife, Sandra, on a series of multicultural picture books. "It's a dynasty," says poet Nikki Grimes. Last month, Jerry Pinkney won the Caldecott Medal, the American Library Association's top prize for picture books, for The Lion & the Mouse, a visual retelling of Aesop's fable. ROUNDUP: African-American history for young readers During a visit to Pinkney's studio near his home, 35 miles north of Manhattan, he and Gloria, along with Brian and Andrea, who had traveled from Brooklyn, talked about the family business of writing and illustrating. Jerry Pinkney was 12 when he got an after-school job at a newsstand at "$6 a week; $3 went right to my mother." His father was a self-taught jack-of-all-trades whose education ended in elementary school. Pinkney struggled in school ("today, they'd call it dyslexia"), but he loved art and carried a sketchbook. One day at the newsstand, a white customer complimented him on his art. The customer was cartoonist John Liney, who drew the Henry comic strip from 1948 to 1979. "He invited me to see his studio, the first time I realized some people got up in the morning and drew images. That was their job. In my neighborhood, there were a few professional musicians, but no professional artists. I didn't know there was such a thing." Pinkney went on to win a scholarship to the Philadelphia Museum College of Art and, after working at a greeting card company, began illustrating books. Pinkney's adventures begin His first in 1964 was The Adventures of Spider: West African Folktales. He went on to illustrate stories by Rudyard Kipling (Rikki-Tikki-Tavi) and Julius Lester (The Old African). He has won five Caldecott Honors, runner-up to the top prize, which he calls "the cherry on the top of the cake." His studio is an airy 900-square-foot space above a garage across the road from his home. No phone. No computer. "Just music — classical in the morning, jazz in the afternoon." He calls himself "a storyteller at heart" who asks himself, "Will I, in the process of making pictures, learn something new?" He seeks projects that "connect with my African-American roots," but finds inspiration everywhere. He's working on a new version of The Three Little Kitchens, inspired by a granddaughter. Above all, he says, "I want to be a strong role model for my family and for other African Americans." Gloria Jean Pinkney, 68, met her future husband at a Philadelphia vocational high school: "Jerry was the most directed person I had ever met. He was 16 going on 17, and he knew he wanted to be an artist." All she wanted was a family. She was born in North Carolina. Her father left when she was still a baby. When she was 8, her mother was murdered. A great-aunt raised her in Philadelphia: "I was a latch-key kid." Her children — three sons, one daughter — were born "1, 2, 3, 4," she says, within four years, "exactly what I wanted." She helped her husband with his research but resisted his urging to write her own stories. But then, she accompanied him to a speech at North Carolina Central University, where he mentioned that his wife was born in Lumberton, N.C. One of Gloria's long-lost relatives was in the audience: "It was a miracle, one of many in my life." She was invited to a family reunion, which inspired her first book, Back Home, in 1992. It was illustrated by her husband. "I knew I loved to talk," she says. "I discovered I love to write." Her recent books are spiritual. In the Forest of Your Remembrance, essays on her Christian faith, is illustrated by her husband and sons Brian and Myles. She says, "I feel we've been given a gift, but it's a gift to share." Creativity nurtured As a boy, Brian Pinkney, 48, wanted to do what his father did but says: "I never felt pushed. I was nurtured, given materials and space, and encouraged." His father adds: "Wherever we lived, we created a common space with art supplies and work tables and no TV. The kids could do what they wanted." His mother remembers: "Brian made an entire city out of pipe cleaners." Jerry Pinkney is known for his watercolors. Brian made his mark with scratchboard, which uses a white board coated with black ink, which is scratched off and colored with pastels and paints. He and his wife, Andrea Davis Pinkney, 46, who writes teen novels, have collaborated on several books about black history, including Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood Up By Sitting Down, released this week on the 50th anniversary of the student sit-in at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. (Its publication coincides with Black History Month, which is this month.) Andrea says she recently asked their daughter, Chloe, 13, if she had ever experienced racism. "She said no, which makes me happy, but reminds me she needs to know history. And after all, African-American history is American history." As for the black faces in his illustrations, Brian says, "it's personal. When I draw a little child, he looks like I did." As his father before him, Brian uses his own children, nieces and nephews as models when he draws. Passing it down By phone, Myles Pinkney, 46, recalls the first time he realized his father was famous: "We were at a museum and people were asking him to sign their books. I knew people asked athletes and movie stars for their autographs, but not artists and writers." Myles fell in love with photography. "My wife says I'm the rebellious one," who uses a camera, unlike the family's other artists, including sister Troy, 49, a Manhattan art therapist, and brother Scott, 47, a fine-arts painter and creative director of a Toronto ad agency. Myles and Sandra run a photo studio near Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Their books, with Sandra's text, include Read and Rise, with a foreword by Maya Angelou. Being named Pinkney helps — but only so much, Myles says. "When my wife suggested we do a book, my father gave me some names. That got us in the door. But we were rejected six or seven times before someone said yes." Leonard Marcus, a historian of children's literature, who wrote about Jerry and Brian Pinkney in his 2007 book Pass It Down; Five Picture-Book Families Make Their Mark, says no other family matches the Pinkneys' "depth of involvement" with books. Marcus also says Jerry Pinkney "came along at a time when the U.S. still wasn't quite ready to acknowledge the multiracial nature of our society in the books it gave its children, and he has played a pivotal role in changing that situation for the better." Grimes says that in the Caldecott Medal's 72-year history, Pinkney is the first individual African American to win. Leo and Diane Dillon, a multiracial couple, won in 1976 and '77. _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail: Free, trusted and rich email service. http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/201469228/direct/01/
