It’s the birthday of children’s book author Paul Fleischman (b. 1952), who won the Newbery Medal for Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices in 1989, just two years after his father, Sid Fleischman, won the Newbery for The Whipping Boy.

Fleischman was born in Monterey, California, to Betty and Sid and raised in Santa Monica. He grew up not only listening to his father read his own work aloud but setting type for his family’s hand printing press. (You know: do the dishes, take out the garbage, set the type…) He studied a couple years at Berkeley, then traveled cross-country and lived in a 1770 house in New Hampshire with no electricity or phone. This experience later inspired Fleischman’s historical fiction.

Fleischman eventually completed his studies at the University of New Mexico and worked several odd jobs, including many that involved books: shelving at a library, clerking at a bookstore, and proofreading. He was also inspired to found a couple of watchdog grammar groups, The Committee to Save the Sentence and ColonWatch, now sadly defunct.

Fleischman’s first book, The Birthday Tree (1979), was a picture book. In addition to about 15 picture books, several collections of short stories and poetry, a couple of plays, and a number of nonfiction books, Fleischman has written many YA novels, including Whirligig (1998). Whirligig tells the story of a teenaged boy who tries to kill himself via car crash but ends up killing the girl driving the other car. The boy agrees to the strange penance laid out by the girl’s mother and as he carries out the penance begins to make his peace with himself and what has occurred.

Fleischman’s most recent book is Fearsome Giant, Fearless Child: A Worldwide Jack and the Beanstalk Story (2019, illustrated by Julie Paschkis), and his nonfiction book, No Map, Great Trip: A Young Writer’s Road to Page One, is due out soon. In 2012, Fleischman was nominated for the international Hans Christian Andersen Award. He lives in Monterey with his wife and has two sons and a stepdaughter.

Have a soft and sunny Thursday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.