News

6 Aug 2024

Big publication day welcome for our newest family member, Korean translation of Ten Things Your Student with Autism Wishes You Knew (Ten Things Teachers Need to Know About Autism). I’m thrumbled to have the chance to connect with 76 million native speakers worldwide.
Many thanks as always to my rainmaker agent, and to Hanmunhwa Multimedia for bringing this edition to life.

 

 

18 July 2024

What a joy to share this luminous retelling of Tricycle Dreams, my favorite story about my grandmother Lillian, in the beautiful Heimat Review. She and Bryce were born more than 100 years apart and as different as chalk and cheese, yet shared a timeless childhood connection.
3-minute read

 

 

1 July 2024

Toddler eating jags ever make you want to tear your hair? My short-short story The Condiment Whisperer is for you, based on a true tale but taken to a delightful extreme.

In the Spring Summer 2024 issue of The Corvus Review. Download the issue here and scroll to p. 40. https://bit.ly/3XHmqus
4-minute read

 

 

4 June 2024
Most folks who want to buy a piano go out and choose one. My piano chose me. And the magic didn’t end there. The Piano’s Choice is a one-of-a-kind love story with a pitch-perfect, wholly unanticipated hero.

Much gratitude to the marvelous editorial staff of Does It Have Pockets?
[5-minute read]

 

 

30 May 2024
My brown thumb goes international! What fun to work with the delightfully droll editors of Funny Pearls UK and bring you My Dirt-y Little Secret.

“It always surfaces this time of year and, like any dirty secret, it causes me guilt. . .”

 

 

27 May 2024
Today on The Brevity Blog: Snark Comes to Spark, my two-letter cure for those inevitable times when inspiration fails us and the muse has gone missing.

 

15 May 2024
1001 Great Ideas has won the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Legacy Nonfiction. Here’s 1001 rays of gratitude for everyone who has been part of this book for the last 20 years.

This makes five awards in two weeks for a grand old book that clearly isn’t ready to go quietly to the backlist yet. 🙂 Available at more than 760 libraries (find one near you at worldcat.org) and wherever books are sold.

 

 

7 May 2024
My longtime pathological hatred of leaf blowers finally gets a klieg light, thanks to CommuterLit Fiction on the Go. In my flash story OVERBLOWN, a callous landscaper is forced to take a close look at the people in the neighborhood he’s disrupting and polluting. An elderly cancer patient, a night worker, an exhausted new mother . . . but wait, there’s more!

3 May 2024
A poem for Pregnancy & Postpartum Psychosis Awareness Day, and for the rest of us in those moments when your own worst naysayer is yourself:

Gratitude to Quail Bell magazine (“a team of fairy punks who are citizens of the world”) for publishing my poem No Idea How, a deleted scene from The River by Starlight wherein Annie’s state asylum caretakers suggest she write her newborn daughter a poem. Annie insists she has no idea how–then does it anyway, embodying her own favorite Thoreau quote: “What people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can.”

 

2 May 2024
1001 Great Ideas has been named to the Eric Hoffer Book Awards 2024 Grand Prize Short List. The Hoffer Awards draw several thousand entrants each year, and only a small percentage make the Grand Prize Short List. So proud of this classic holding its own and rising above so many newer books. It’s also in the running for the Hoffer Nonfiction Legacy Award, to be announced in the next couple of weeks.

.
1001 now joins Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew and The River by Starlight as Hoffer Grand Prize Short List-ers. Learn more about all of them on my website.

 

26 April 2024
In its 20th anniversary year, my first book has won triple honors in the 2024 American Legacy Book Awards. Continuously in print since 2004 and translated into 13 languages, it’s been quiet proof that the best answers to our challenges on the spectrum are often the timeless ones.

Winner – Education/Academic
Winner – Parenting and Relationships
Finalist – Cross-genre Nonfiction

 

20 March 2024
Another new family member arriving soon, Croatian translation of Ten Things from Ostvarenje publishers. Love this little guy’s zingy energy, and I couldn’t be happier that he’s now reaching out to 6 million Croatian speakers around the world.

 

5 March 2024
Jak słodko! First look at the bright new Polish edition of Ten Things, coming soon from my good partners at Jagiellonian University Press. This is our third collaboration, and what a joy it is to be able to reach the 38 million native speakers in Poland, and millions more in so many others countries. Can’t wait to welcome this new family member to my #WeAreTheWorld shelf.

 

2 March 2024
In like a lion–my short story Cake and Shake, in the March issue of Halfway Down the Stairs literary magazine. A tale of two mid-century teens confronted with the startling consequences of “too much of a good thing,” this is my best short fiction writing to date, a labor of love over two years in the making. Hope you can take a read.

 

 

26 Feb 2024
Today is my dad’s birthday, and also publication day for Loss: Volume 9 in the Lifespan series of anthologies from Pure Slush. It includes my remembrance of him, “Dad Lost and Found,” and how continuing my journey without him brought me new discoveries and a place where I now think more about having him than losing him.

.
Also available on my blog, The Writer by Starlight.

 

14 Feb 2024
Now in its 20th anniversary year, continuously in print that whole time and translated into fifteen languages, 1001 Great Ideas is nominated for this year’s Eric Hoffer Legacy Nonfiction Book Award. Winner and finalists announced in May.

10 Feb 2024
Grandi notizie per i miei lettori italiani! This week I signed for Italian translations of two more of my books, bringing the total to three. (Ten Things will soon be re-released in its newest edition.) Very happy to be working again with my long-time publishing partner Edizioni Centro Studi Erickson. My agent is *il migliore*!

1 Feb 2024
Delighted to share my short story Tourist Trapped, an exploration of the regret and redemption that can come when we don’t appreciate what we have until it’s gone.
.
With many thanks again to Well Read magazine for giving my work such a good home. My essay What She Thinks About When She Thinks About Shoes will appear shortly in their Best of 2023 anthology.

 

12 May 2023

It’s a two-fer! The Ten Things twins won the IPPY gold medal for nonfiction series in the 2023 Independent Publisher Book Awards.

30 April 2023
My ninth Hoffer Award but the first big win for Student. What a thrill!
.
“A simple and direct path for parents and instructors to interact with children with autism. By focusing on the child and not necessarily the lesson, we can build quality student-teacher relationships, allowing ASD children to thrive in a trusting environment that believes in their abilities. Highly informative.”
.
Much gratitude to all who were so integral to bringing this book into the world.

28 Nov 2022
Historical but timeless, The River by Starlight has won American Book Fests’ 2022 Best Book Award for Legacy Fiction.