A Blast with Kristine O'Connell George

I took my handy dandy FlipCam with me to the 8th annual ALSC Poetry Blast and made short one minute (more or less) movies of the poets reading their works to share with you. Next: Kristine O’Connell George.

Here's the short, lovely intro written and presented by host and poet Marilyn Singer and used with permission.

Kristine O’Connell George tells us: “I live with my family in a rural area in the Santa Monica Mountains of southern California and often find poetry in my own backyard. The owl roosting in our 300-year old native oak, the packs of coyotes howling at night, the neighborhood peacocks, and the frog who lives on our front porch all seem to find their way into my work. Someday, I think I'll write about the raccoon who played with the dog's toys in the yard at 2 a.m. Or the skunk family . . .”


Kristine O’Connell George says she "fell in love with children's poetry" in 1989 during a children's poetry writing class taught by esteemed poet and teacher Myra Cohn Livingston for the UCLA Writer's Program. She went on to create many books of her own, to serve as poetry consultant for PBS's Storytime, and to win the IRA/Lee Bennett Hopkins Promising Poet Award, among numerous other honors. 


Her works include The Great Frog Race, winner of the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award; Old Elm Speaks, which received the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators’ Golden Kite Award; Little Dog and Duncan, recipient of the Claudia Lewis Poetry Award; and Hummingbird Nest, which, in addition to another Claudia Lewis Award, also received the ASPCA Henry Bergh Children’s Book Award and the John Burroughs Nature Award.


In addition to writing, Kris says she has more hobbies than free time: tennis, golf, hiking, photography, collage, watercolors, gardening, sewing, and, of course, reading. She proudly declares: “I am never bored."



Kris shared several entries from her latest book, Emma Dilemma, conveying the lovely story-in-poems that emerges across the poems. Here we see Jessica (Emma's big sister) comforted by her parents when she feels responsible for her little sister's accidental broken arm.

Image credit: 

Sylvia Vardell

Posting by Sylvia M. Vardell © 2011. All rights reserved.