Shel silverstein biography scholastic news
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Falling Up by Shel Silverstein
Falling Up is a charming children’s poetry collection written and illustrated by the esteemed American writer Shel Silverstein. It was first published in 1996 by HarperCollins. Falling Up is Silverstein’s third collection of children’s poetries, and the last one published before his death. It features 144 poems with accompanying drawings and solidified the author’s reputation as an acclaimed children’s author-illustrator. Other notable works by Shel Silverstein include his two prior children’s poetry collections Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic, as well as the OG book on environmental sustainability: The Giving Tree. His books are often used by elementary school teachers to teach poetry to children. Falling Up contains some of his most famous and beloved works, including “Allison Beals & Her 25 Eels”, “The Dragon of Grindly Grun,” and “The Voice.”
Shel Silverstein was born in 1930 outside of Chicago, Illinois. He was a
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« Night after night, fåraherde forged the inchoate thoughts and feelings of a whole generation of fans into an axiom that went something like: ‘The language of our culture no längre describes real life and, pretty soon, something’s gonna blow.‘. » — Donald Fagen
Today’s a very august occasion, for it marks the birth centennial of that sublime storyteller, jean Shepherd (July 26, 1921 – October 16, 1999), so we’ll celebrate it… in comics!
Let’s close in highfalutin mode with a most pertinent bit of Longfellow (1807–1882):
The shades of night were falling fast,
As through an Alpine by passed
A ungdom, who bore, ‘mid snow and ice,
A banner with the strange device,
Excelsior!
His panna was sad; his eye beneath,
Flashed like a falchion from its sheath,
And like a silver clarion rung
The accents of that unknown tongue,
Excelsior!
In happy homes • A teacher gave Aida Salazar the first book she ever owned. He also gave her a pen – a really fancy one. It came in its own special box and had changeable ink cartridges; high technology before the advent of smartphones and tablet computers. No one read to Salazar as a child – there just wasn’t the time. Her family emigrated to the United States from Mexico when she was young, and she grew up in Los Angeles. Her parents didn’t speak English, and they sometimes worked two or three jobs while trying to raise their family of seven children. But in elementary school, Salazar fell in love with reading. “By the time the fifth grade ended, I had read all of the books in the classroom library,” she shared with a room filled with third graders at the Hartford Public Library. “And then I started working on the school library books.” Salazar still owns that first book, a beloved copy of “Where the Sidewalk Ends,” written by Shel Silverstein and given to her by that teacher, Mr. Clark.