Best Selling Books by Tracie Vaughn Zimmer

As her thirteenth birthday approaches, JoEllen decides to bring together her two separate lives--one as Joey, who enjoys weekends with her father and other relatives on a farm, and another as Ellen, who lives with her mother in a Cincinnati apartment near her school and friends.

Narrator Anne Marie paints pictures of family life from grief to hope after her father abandons his "four girls"--Anne Marie and her mother and twin and baby sisters. Anne Marie''s story is written as a series of linked poems with illustrations.

Sharp and sweet and honest. -Linda Sue Park, Newbery Medal winner

In this collection of free-verse poems, inspired by Walt Whitman''s I Hear America Singing, Tracie Vaughn Zimmer celebrates workers and the doing of work. The poems are short and direct, with strong, fresh images, and readers can easily imagine themselves in the roles she portrays: welder, librarian, surgeon, retail clerk, camp counselor. The illustrations are as original as the text---amazing multilayered collages made of paper, found objects, ephemera, photographs, dried flowers, and archival images. Steady Hands is sure to inspire discussion, creative writing, art projects, and new answers to the old question: What do you want to do when you grow up?

In 1850s Pittsburgh, thirteen-year-old Owen leaves his younger brother and sneaks aboard a circus housed in a riverboat, where he befriends a freed slave, learns to work with elephants, and finally comes to terms with the choices he has made in his difficult life.

Facts about elephants interspersed with poems.