by Ann Rousseau Smith, SCBWI CenCal News Liaison

Happy National Poetry Month!

Longtime SCBWI member Joan Bransfield Graham is an award-winning children’s poet whose books include Splish Splash and Flicker Flash—shape poems about water and light (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Both books were School Library Journal Best Books of the Year and NCTE Notable Children’s Books in the Language Arts, among many other honors. Her other published works include The Song We Chose to Sing (ACTA), a poetry/music CD, and The Poem That Will Not End: Fun with Poetic Forms and Voices (Amazon Children’s Publishing/Two Lions). She has also contributed to many poetry anthologies.

Joan’s newest book is Awesome Earth: Concrete Poems Celebrate Caves, Canyons, and Other Fascinating Landforms, illustrated by Tania García (Clarion Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, February 2025). Fun, concrete poems and vibrant art celebrate the many shapes and forms of our planet Earth.

Joan took a moment to answer some questions for the Kite Tales Blog.

ANN ROUSSEAU SMITH: Congratulations on your newest book, Awesome Earth, illustrated by Tania García. You have written many poems in many poetic forms. Why concrete or shape poems for this new book?

JOAN BRANSFIELD GRAHAM: Thank you, Ann! Since I was going to be featuring landforms, shapes that grace our Earth, what better way to explain a shape than with shape itself—concrete poetry. Not only is the poem talking about the landform but also showing it. Awesome Earth combines poetry, science, and art to explore what creates landforms from “Mountain,” “Glacier,” and “Volcano” to “Island,” “Hills,” and “Hoodoos”—artistic wonders that cover our Earth’s surface. It’s a perfect book for STEAM, National Poetry Month, and Earth Day. Many teachers have told me that my poetry has proven helpful for their students who are acquiring English as it offers many clues to unlocking the words.

ARS: I love how poems in any form—concrete or other—create visual images for the reader or listener. Can you share any writing tips for the poet in all of us?

JBG: MY FIVE FAVORITE POETRY WRITING TIPS

1.    Use all of your senses.

2.    Use vigorous verbs, marvelous metaphors.

3.    Each poem is a mini-story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. If your poem doesn’t have a payoff or new perspective at the end, maybe it’s upside down. Don’t give it away at the start.

4.    Use details to reach the universal. Zoom in for a close-up or write a wide-angle, big picture poem. 

5.    Write the poem you’ve never read before.

ARS: Since Awesome Earth is a nonfiction book it contains back matter, including information on landforms, a glossary, and additional resources for readers. How involved are you with the back matter? Do you find all the information and references, or does the publisher assist?

JBG: I did all of the back matter myself, including the photos. Originally, the additional information was going to be sidebars, but the design team decided to use everything as back matter. It’s a challenging endeavor to take a huge amount of research, distill it, and make it easy to understand. How do you introduce tectonic plate theory and continental drift to a four- to eight-year-old? My books always have a much wider age range than what is listed. In ice-skating, doing jumps and twirls can look so effortless because the skaters have put a lot of work into it. The same goes for writing. Speaking of age range, landforms are studied in all grades, just in different ways. Once a woman said to me, “I don’t know who is having more fun with this book (Flicker Flash)—my six-year-old grandson or his father, who is a physicist!” It’s wonderful to get a response like that!

ARS: You are a longtime member of the SCBWI and a volunteer board member of the Central-Coastal California (CenCal) Region. How helpful has your involvement with the organization been to your writing and publishing career?

JBG: When we first moved to California, I was at the local library one day reading a copy of The Writer magazine, where I saw an ad for the SCBW (it didn’t have the “I” yet) Summer Conference in Santa Monica. Where is Santa Monica? I thought it wasn’t too far away, decided to attend, and have been going ever since. I’ve made lifelong friends, heard amazing writers, artists, editors, and agents speak and share their knowledge of both craft and the business side of publishing, learned a great deal, and had an incredible opportunity to meet a wealth of creative, amazing people, and so I have been a volunteer forever—I am so grateful I joined! Thanks to you, Ann, for your volunteer work, for helping to share happy news and keep us all connected!

Thank you, Joan, for all your thoughtful responses!

For more information about Joan and her books visit her childrensauthorsnetwork! website. Join her on Facebook.

For information on SCBWI-CenCal events (open to all SCBWI members!), go to scbwi.org/regions/cencal.

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Images provided by Joan Bransfield Graham and the SCBWI Central-Coastal Region