Put These Local Children’s Book Authors
On Your Kids’ Summer Reading Lists

As kids, how many of us could have imagined one of our favorite authors living just around the corner? “I wasn’t sure where my favorite authors lived, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t anywhere near Ohio,” remembers Cinda Williams Chima. Yet today, Chima, Sara Holbrook and Mia Coulton are just a few of the talented children’s book authors who not only live in Northeast Ohio, but regularly visit schools and kids’ events to meet their pint-sized fans in person. They’ve made Cleveland their writing home, while putting Cleveland settings on the page for young readers around the world.

Cinda Chima: The New Face in Young-Adult Fantasy

Move over J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter. Meet Cinda Chima and Jack Swift. As a lifelong reader of fantasy and self-described “Lord of the Rings nerd “ – she even has a song from the movie as the ringtone on her cell phone – Chima never thought she’d do much more than read fantasy novels for most of her life. She’s a resident of Strongsville and a dietician by training, currently on the faculty at the University of Akron, and may be familiar to adult readers as a regular contributor to The Plain Dealer’s Wednesday Taste section.

But despite a busy career, a family (Chima’s two sons are now 19 and 22) and a steady non-fiction writing gig, Chima decided in 2001 to try her hand at writing her own young-adult fantasy novel. “I was totally ignorant of what was involved. I had no training, I was just an avid fantasy reader,” she says. The result of that headlong effort was 2006’s “The Warrior Heir,” published by Hyperion Books for Children and now available in paperback. It’s the present-day story of Jack Swift, a high-schooler from Trinity, Ohio (modeled after Oberlin) who discovers that he’s the last of a dying breed of Warrior Heirs and must fight for his life against evil wizards.

Chima’s follow-up effort, “The Wizard Heir,” was released this May, and the third book in the series, “The Dragon Heir,” is due out in 2008. When she visits schools and libraries in Northeast Ohio to talk with young readers, she says they express appreciation for the familiar settings of her books – including characters visiting Cedar Point and battling wizards over Lake Erie – which stand in contrast to the medieval castles of Harry Potter.

So how does Cinda Chima feel about those inevitable comparisons to J.K. Rowling? “I think any fantasy author would love to have their books compared to Harry Potter,” she says. “It’s provided more of a focus on fantasy and makes books like mine easier to market. But you have to believe in what you’re doing, and if you’re writing a fantasy book just to make a buck, that’s going to come across.”

Chima is definitely one of those true believers, tapping into the emotions and experiences that make fantasy so popular among young-adult readers. “I think most of us go through a phase where we like to read fantasy, but some of us just say in that phase,” she says. “Kids will often tell me they read fantasy because they like to escape from those awkward middle school years.” But Chima says the best compliments come from those kids who start their reading habit with her books. “It’s very rewarding when I talk to kids who say they don’t like to read, but that they picked up my book and couldn’t put it down.”

Sara Holbrook: Teaching Kids to Love Poetry

In her former career as director of communications for the Cleveland office of law firm Jones Day, Sara Holbrook often interacted with visiting lawyers from around the world. “They would all complain about having to come to Cleveland, but then once they got here they really liked it,” she said.

Several years later, that experience became the inspiration for one of Holbrook’s nine children’s books, called “What’s So Big About Cleveland, Ohio?,” published by Gray & Co. Just like Holbrook’s co-workers, 10-year-old Amanda complains bitterly about a family trip to Cleveland until she discovers all of the special things about this place we call home.

Aside from this single foray into fiction, Holbrook’s main focus is on writing poetry books for children, which have included “The Dog Ate My Homework,” “Walking on the Boundaries of Change” and “Nothing’s the End of the World.” Her poems are mined from the emotional childhood experiences of bullying, sibling rivalry, anger, first love and more. This Mentor resident and mother of two grown daughters – one manages her business and the other is a sixth-grade teacher at Bay Middle School who helps with testing her poems – has a following all around the world, with invitations this year to visit schools in Cairo, Jakarta and Istanbul.

“They’re wild about poetry in elementary school,” she says. “The reason is that the librarians shelve poetry with the joke books, so when I come in they’re already laughing, thinking I’m going to tell some jokes.” It’s in middle school that kids get skeptical about poetry, she says, “because we’re skipping them right from Shel Silverstein all the way to Walt Whitman. If you’re having middle-schoolers read poetry about mid-life crisis, they’re just not there.”

Some high schoolers have a greater appreciation of poetry thanks to Def Poetry Jam, “but it’s all the kids in black sitting in the back who are the poets and we lose everyone else,” says Holbrook. “At some point schools start having kids study poetry and take away the writing component. That’s like watching golf on TV if you don’t play the game.”

Holbrook is trying to influence the way teachers engage students with poetry through her professional book titles like “Practical Poetry: A Non-Standard Approach to Meeting Content-Area Standards.” Plus she spends about 100 days out of every year in schools as poetry’s own personal cheerleader. “I think about all the lessons poetry taught me,” she says. “Poetry is not only an art product, but also a vehicle for learning.”

Mia Coulton: Extending a Paw to Budding Readers

Growing up as the daughter of a librarian, Mia Coulton was surrounded by books and loved to read but had no interest in being a writer. “It just wasn’t something I desired to be,” she says. “I was more inclined toward being a veterinarian.” So she spent her library time poring over dog books, then went home to dress up her dog Rhubarb in costumes.

“When I go to school assemblies, I tell kids that I’m doing pretty much the same things now as I did when I was a child,” laughs Coulton. Except today she dresses up her 10-year-old 105-pound yellow Labrador Danny for his starring role in her series of 39 books designed to help kids in pre-K through second grade learn to read.

Coulton never became a veterinarian, but instead went into education, where she eventually became the Reading Recovery teacher at Boulevard Elementary in Shaker Heights. Using the Reading Recovery system developed in New Zealand to encourage early literacy, she began taking photographs of her dog Danny and creating short books to use in her classroom. In 2002, at the urging of a friend, Coulton tried selling her Danny books at the annual National Reading Recovery Conference, and received an overwhelmingly positive response.

Just five years later, she’s sold more than 100,000 Danny books in the U.S., Canada, New Zealand and Europe. She retired from teaching in 2003 to focus full-time on MaryRuth Books, Inc., the publishing company she formed to support the Danny books. She and Danny have tackled every topic from seasons and holidays – “Halloween Danny” was her first book – to the latest science-themed Danny books like “Danny and the Monarch Butterfly.” Ideas for new topics may come from teachers and librarians, from Coulton’s own childhood experiences, or from just about anywhere. “I was listening to NPR one day and heard something about earthworms, so I wrote ‘Danny and the Little Worm,’” she says.

When she’s not writing, taking photographs or running her business, Coulton makes regular appearances at school assemblies and reading programs throughout Northeast Ohio. But just in case she ever starts to consider herself a celebrity writer, Danny’s right there to remind her who the real star of the show is. “When we go to assemblies, kids are so excited to see the real dog. They just can’t believe it’s a real dog,” she says.

Even though writing is what pays the bills these days, Coulton still considers herself an educator first and foremost. “When you have the privilege to see a child making that connection, it’s really something,” she says. “All of a sudden you see it in their eyes and they’ve got it, and it’s like ‘wow.’”

From Cool Cleveland contributor Jennifer Keirn jenniferkATwowway.com
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