Liz Garton Scanlon
escanlon@austincc.edu

Liz Garton Scanlon taught English Composition and Creative Writing at ACC’s Pinnacle and Riverside campuses before taking a number of years off to have children. She has recently returned to teach poetry and classes in writing for children. Her next two picture books will both be illustrated by Marla Frazee and published by Harcourt Children’s Books. They are expected in 2009 and 2010.

Scanlon’s picture book A Sock is a Pocket for your Toes: A Pocket Book (ISBN: 0060295260) – illustrated by NYTimes best-selling artist Robin Preiss Glasser – was published by HarperCollins in 2004. Since then, the book has been picked up by both the Junior Library Guild and the Children’s Book of the Month Club… was selected as a Children’s Crown Gallery nominee… inspired the spring performance by the University of Utah’s Virginia Tanner Dance Company… and has received warm praise in the press.

Reviews of A Sock is a Pocket of Your Toes: A Pocket Book

Kirkus Reviews
In bubbly verse and playful imagery reminiscent of Mary Ann Hoberman's classic A House Is a House For Me (1978), Scanlon expands the idea of a "pocket" to include bowls, balloons, and bathtubs, hats, horseshoes, homes, and more… Young readers and listeners see their own worlds in a new way, and primed for Ruth Krauss's antediluvian, but still mind-expanding A Hole Is to Dig (1952).

An excerpt from Library Journal
In lively, rollicking rhyme, this book explores and stretches the concept of pockets as it follows four diverse families throughout a day as they interact with one another… Glasser's fresh, bright watercolor-and-pen illustrations are perfectly married to the text and tie the whole concept into a cohesive whole ... A spur to imaginative thinking, this offering will encourage parents and children to examine their surrounding and create their own pockets that echo the themes of the poem.