We love excuses to travel, and our recent book tour in Arizona gave us a wonderful reason to visit our old stomping ground.

First stop was in Casa Grande for the Arizona Young Author’s Conference, where we enjoyed three classrooms with 30 children each.

Next was a visit to Northern Arizona University, where Steffanie was invited to speak to Visual Communication students. Her topic was on inspiring them to use their graphic design and creative skills to make the world a better place. She highlighted her work with Art with Heart and answered many questions about the creative process of making a book.

While there, we enjoyed visiting the Grand Canyon, Macy’s Coffee House, Sedona and our old campus.

Our last stop was at the Tucson Book Festival – a community celebration that drew close to 50,000 people to the University of Arizona campus. Our panel discussion topic was”Married to an Author” and we shared the stage with Emma Bull and her husband Will Shetterly. Afterwards, we hosted story time and read from “Such a Silly Baby”.

Besides getting to meet the wonderful children – which is always a highlight – we had the great joy of getting to spend time with friends and family.

Christmas came early for us this year!

We were thrilled to see that Such a Silly Baby was featured as one of four recommended baby books in yesterday’s special children’s books section of the New York Times Sunday Book Review.

It was always an unspoken dream, so it made it quite surreal to actually see it in print. Visit our Reviews section to read it!

Posted by Steffanie   November 10, 2008

Posted by Steffanie   October 10, 2008

It started when I met the legendary Seymour Chwast in Philadelphia during the national Illustrator’s Conference (ICON3). I had been invited to speak during the event and Seymour was on the Board of Directors. During one of our conversations, I asked, “So when is your next children’s book coming out?” to which he replied, “Oh…there are no good manuscripts out there right now.” Not hesitating even a moment, I blurted out, “Well, I have one!” This was, I admit, uncharacteristically bold, but I guess I figured I had nothing to lose and that this moment would never come again in my entire life.

Well, I’m pretty positive he was just being polite when he said I could send it to him. But luckily, he loved it and asked if he could send it to his agent in New York. YES! YES! YES! I screamed (in my head), but after I contained myself, I emailed back, “That would be fine.”

Another person who helped us during this process was our friend Joe Michaels. Besides having excellent taste in music, Joe is a great champion of creativity. When the book was about to come out, he casually mentioned that he knew someone who did videos for authors. One email later, Joe had introduced us to Todd Stevens, co-executive producer for the Emmy Award winning show, Friends and co-founder of the extraordinary online book promotion company, ExpandedBooks.com. Todd flew out from L.A. to film Rick and I at our first-ever book reading.

The reading was set-up at a local daycare that our son had attended. The week before the filming, we prepped the kids by going from room to room reading Such a Silly Baby to children between the ages of two and four. After reading to one group in particular, the children came up, giving us hugs and kisses and telling us how much they loved us. It was absolutely wonderful!

Posted by Steffanie August 29, 2008