new storytelling by Howard M. Singer
Debut children's picture book author with fiction and nonfiction titles ready for review.
about Howard M. Singer
Once upon a time many years ago, I read picture books to my brother's three children- choosing titles that were clever and goofy and offering delightfully humorous entertainment. I graduated from the University of South Florida where I worked on the student newspaper and campus radio station: my story on a central Florida crop freeze aired on NPR's All Things Considered. I have written news for radio, print and television. I was the transportation reporter for The Washington Times and two freelance articles appeared in The Washington Post. I created and edited client newsletters for Macy's and JCPenney. As a volunteer, I built a PR platform for a Wash., DC nonprofit without a budget, organized a collegiate career fair for the American Marketing Association and brought residents to a Northern Virginia hospital on Christmas Day to sing carols and hand out greeting cards to patients. When not reading or writing, I enjoy cycling and tennis, a devoted Chicago Cubs and Miami Dolphins fan and favorite composers are John Williams, Elmer Bernstein and Aaron Copeland. I am a member of the SCBWI and work with Jumpstart's Read for the Record program. I currently have several picture book titles completed (unillustrated) as well as a nonfiction manuscript on the Holocaust (ages 10 and up).
The Write Stuff
"A book is a gift you can open again and again." - Anonymous
"To learn to read is to light a fire - every syllable that is spelled is a spark." -Victor Hugo
"Reading is important because if you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about anything."
-Tomie dePaola
"People who report as little as a half-hour a day of book reading had a significant survival advantage over those who did not read." -Becca R. Levy, Professor of Epidemiology, Yale
"Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are." -Mason Cooley
"To me, the perfect picture book is a spontaneous creation, inspired by an invisible and mysterious muse not to be found in the marketplace." -Kate Banks
"The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better." -Stephen King
"I don't think about what children want. You get an idea and you just do it." -Raymond Briggs, as told to the BBC, 2017
"The person who doesn't read has no advantage over the person who can't." -Mark Twain
"Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again." -Louisa May Alcott
"I truly believe that learning the craft of fiction writing is vital and that you can't do that in classes." -Barbara Taylor Bradford
"Don't refuse a child if he asks you to tell the same story over and over and over again." -Janusz Korczak
"I make notes and scrawl things down, and suddenly, as a result of scrawling, a notion hits me...the book tells me where it wants to go, and I write and draw accordingly." -Jules Feiffer
"I published my first picture book for children when I was 62-a bit late to the reading circle...But William Steig didn't publish his first picture book until he was 61 and Laura Wilder was 65 when Little House in the Big Woods came out in 1932." -Bruce Handy
"The decisive encounter between children and books takes place in the classroom. If it happens in a creative situation, where it is life that counts and not exercises, a taste for reading can arise, a pleasure with which one is not born, because it is not an instinct." -Gianni Rodari
"I conceive a knowledge of books is the basis upon which other knowledge is to be built." -George Washington, 1771
"What got me interested in writing was being unable to write."-Peter Elbow
"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales...if you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." -Albert Einstein
"Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation." -Walter Cronkite
"The greatest writer for children? William Blake is my favorite (The Songs of Innocence and The Songs of Experience) - these tell you all about this: what it is to be a child- not childish, but a child inside your adult self - and how much better a person you are for being such." -Maurice Sendak
"The picture book is one of the great literary forms, but it's an underappreciated literary form. People don't really understand how picture books work to tell stories, with the interplay of text and image, and the page turn. And people underestimate children." -Mac Barnett
"When you look up a word in the dictionary, you own it in a way you didn't before." -Martin Amis
"She is widely credited with helping to establish what is now a robust picture book nonfiction category." -Publishers Weekly, about author Jeanette Winter.
"Everyone should have a library card. It's like a bicycle but for your brain." -Jason Schwartzman
"At a time when the aisles of many school libraries are stuffed with fluff biographies and celebrity-penned vanity projects, it's refreshing to see people taking a chance to make something different." -Adam Rubin
Suggested Reading
- "Kids' Books Don't Need To Be Only About Kids," by Pamela Paul, 12/23/22, The New York Times
- "Picture Books Being Challenged in America," by Elizabeth A. Harris and Erica Ackerberg, 1/8/24, The New York Times
- "Volunteers Find a Novel Way to Help Shelter Dogs," by Taylor Croft, 6/4/23, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
- "Garbage Collectors Open Library With Abandoned Books," 1/15/18, CNN.com
- "Reading Aloud Can Remedy Covid Learning Loss," by Meghan Cox Gurdon, 9/17/22, The Wall Street Journal
- The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, by Evan Friss
- Pictured Worlds: Masterpieces of Children's Book Art by 101 Essential Illustrators From Around the World, by Leonard S. Marcus
- Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children's Literature As An Adult, by Bruce Handy.
- Ernest Hemingway on Writing
- How Should One Read a Book, (Renard Press.com), by Virginia Woolf
- (Paper) How Reading Books Fosters Language Development Around the World, by David Dickinson, Vanderbilt University, 2011
- The Little Engine That Could, by Watty Piper
- "What Parents Lose When They Don't Read To Their Children," by Ilana Kurshan, The Atlantic/8/24/25
- The 25 Greatest Picture Books of the Past 25 Years: slate.com
- The Storyteller, by Katie Englehart, The New York Times Magazine/9/28/25 (about Robert Munsch)
Tips for parents to encourage a love of reading:
- Introduce language as early as possible.
- Make reading a regular part of the bedtime routine - reading books should be a favorite bedtime activity.
- Offer a wide variety of stories including poetry, nonfiction and fiction.
- Help children discover the magic of all books.
- Make reading a fun learning experience.
Information Desk
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Thank you!
Onward,
Howard