Beth Kephart

Illustrated by the renowned Russian-born artist Olga Dugina, this fantastical picture book presents a world of flying lions and lavish parties, mythical creatures and beautiful schemes. As the pages turn, the text invites the reader in with a series of What if? questions that are both seemingly absurd and ultimately profound: What if you could fly? What if you were banging the cymbals in a ruckus parade? What if you fell asleep in the crooked arm of a tree and awoke to a scene like a dream? What if you could wish any wish at all? What if you could live your story again? National Book Award Finalist Beth Kephart's text draws attention to the rich, symbolic journey--and possibilities--suggested by Dugina's art. A book that begs to be read again and again, by both adults and children.

Paper both shapes and defines us. Baby books, diaries, sewing patterns, diplomas, resumes, letters, death certificates-we find our stories in them. My Life in Paper is Beth Kephart’s memoiristic exploration of the paper legacies we forge and leave. Kephart’s obsession with paper began in the wake of her father’s death, when she began to handcraft books and make and marble paper in his memory. But it was when she read My Life with Paper, an autobiography by the late renowned paper hunter and historian Dard Hunter, that she felt she had found a kindred spirit, someone to whom she might address a series of one-sided letters about life and how we live it. Remembering and crafting, wanting and loving, doubting and forgetting-the spine and weave of My Life in Paper came into view. Paper, for Kephart, provides proof of our yearning, proof of our failure, proof of the people who loved us and the people we have lost. It offers, too, a counterweight to the fickle state of memory. My Life in Paper, illustrated by the author herself, is an intimate and poignant meditation on life’s most pressing questions.

In this lively, lyrical picture book biography, meet the groundbreaking, outspoken, legendary editor of the best-loved books for children, and see how she inspired Maurice Sendak, Margaret Wise Brown, and others to create Where the Wild Things Are, Good Night Moon, and many more classics. "Ursula Nordstrom was a grown-up who never forgot what it was to be a child." The girl who'd always loved to read would grow up to work in the Department of Books for Boys and Girls at Harper & Brothers Publishers. Soon she was editing books by Margaret Wise Brown and E. B. White, discovering new talent like John Steptoe and Maurice Sendak, and reinventing what a book for children should be. "Children want to be seen," she'd tell her writers. "Not good enough for you," she'd scribble in the margins of their manuscripts, asking them to revise. Her favorite books of all? "Good books for bad children," she'd say. And those books went on to win every award imaginable, including the Caldecott and Newbery Medals and the National Book Award.

In this lively, lyrical picture book biography, meet the groundbreaking, outspoken, legendary editor of the best-loved books for children, and see how she inspired Maurice Sendak, Margaret Wise Brown, and others to create Where the Wild Things Are, Good Night Moon, and many more classics. "Ursula Nordstrom was a grown-up who never forgot what it was to be a child." The girl who'd always loved to read would grow up to work in the Department of Books for Boys and Girls at Harper & Brothers Publishers. Soon she was editing books by Margaret Wise Brown and E. B. White, discovering new talent like John Steptoe and Maurice Sendak, and reinventing what a book for children should be. "Children want to be seen," she'd tell her writers. "Not good enough for you," she'd scribble in the margins of their manuscripts, asking them to revise. Her favorite books of all? "Good books for bad children," she'd say. And those books went on to win every award imaginable, including the Caldecott and Newbery Medals and the National Book Award.

A picture book about the places we go to create, inspired by Virginia Woolf and her noted essaySometimes Virginia Woolf wrote her stories in a garden shed. Sometimes she wrote them among stacks of books in a cool basement. And you? Where do you go to think, to dream, to be? The shade beneath a tall tree? The brick step on a city stoop? The cozy spot beneath the kitchen table? Or inside the night’s deep dark? Not all rooms require four walls and a roof. Inspired by the writer Virginia Woolf and her celebrated essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” A Room of Your Own is about the importance of claiming a space for oneself.

A poetic story about the life and work of William Morris, maker of beautiful, useful things, sure to engage young dreamers and artists alikeWilliam Morris is best known for his colorful wallpapers and textiles, inspired by the English forests and wild foliage where he grew up. But did you know this icon of the Arts and Crafts Movement was also a poet, a painter, a preservationist, an activist, an environmentalist, and a maker of many other beautiful useful things, like books?

A poetic picture-book biography about artist N. C. Wyeth’s daughter, Henriette, a talented painter in her own rightAnd I think of the girl I am and the girl I’ll be:A painter, like Pa. An actress (maybe). A fairy with wings. A father and daughter sneak away from their big, busy family to paint in the wild landscape. Together, they paint a lily, bright and white as a star; the green growing into the cap of a strawberry; the blue in the sky running pink. Henriette’s father is N. C. Wyeth, the famous artist, who encourages her to paint what she sees, to awaken into her dreams, and she does, in this poetic picture book inspired by a famous American family of artists.

Wife | Daughter | Self investigates identity and the writing life through the perspective of one of the nation’s top memoir teachers and critics. Curiously, inventively, Beth Kephart reflects on the iterative, composite self in her new memoir—traveling to lakes and rivers, New Mexico and Mexico, the icy waters of Alaska and a hot-air balloon launch in search of understanding. She is accompanied, often, by her Salvadoran-artist husband. She spends time, a lot of time, with her widowed father. As she looks at them she ponders herself and comes to terms with the person she is still becoming. At once sweeping and intimate, Wife | Daughter | Self is a memoir built of interlocking essays by an acclaimed author, teacher, and critic.

"Reading her, you see she hasn't left poetry entirely. Poetry's precision and its indirect approach to truth--groping sideways toward it, showing it but not necessarily stating it--stamp her prose; her leaps and metaphors can be at once seductive and elliptical. But she does try to tell you what she means. She's all for the writer's burning truth, for instance, as long as the writer's imagination includes others." Richard Gilbert, Woven Tale PressStrike the Empty: notes for readers, writers, and teachers of memoir brings together five years of Beth Kephart's writing on memoir and memoir makers, some of which first appeared in Juncture Notes. It offers reflections on eternal imperfection and the poetics of truth, memoir as politics and the abandonment of the linear, the power of not insisting and failure as the first indicator of success, and dozens of truth-bleeding books. Interviews with Casey Gerald, Kristen Radtke, Megan Stielstra, Chloe Honum, Paul Lisicky, Inara Verzemnieks, Judy Goldman, Nicole Chung, Will Dowd, and others are featured. Abigail Thomas's place in memoir history, Bruce Springsteen's memoir-inducing river songs, Andrew Wyeth's inspirations for writers, the empathetic imagination, the high-wire act of reviewing memoirs, and the art of the suppose are among the topics that are deeply explored. Beautifully illustrated with black-and-white photographs and inspirational quotes, Strike the Empty is, by turns, emphatic and questing. It celebrates memoir for what memoir can be--transcendent and transcending.

Philadelphia has been at the heart of many books by award-winning author Beth Kephart, but none more so than the affectionate collection Love. This volume of personal essays and photographs celebrates the intersection of memory and place. Kephart writes lovingly, reflectively about what Philadelphia means to her. She muses about meandering on SEPTA trains, spending hours among the armor in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and taking shelter at Independence Mall during a downpour. In Love, Kephart shares her loveof Reading Terminal Market at Thanksgiving: “This abundant, bristling market is, in November, the most unlonesome place around.” She waxes poetic about the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, the mustard in a Salumeria sandwich, and the “coins slipped between the lips of Philbert the pig.” Kephart also extends her journeys to the suburbs, Glenside and Ardmore-and beyond, to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; Stone Harbor, New Jersey; and Wilmington, Delaware. What emerges is a valentine to the City of Brotherly Love and its environs. In Love, Philadelphia is “more than its icons, bigger than its tagline.”

What are we supposed to do with that lovely, infuriating, instigating, mischievous blank page? Who are we, when we're being uncommonly honest? Where do we stand, in the landscape of truth? How do we discover and profess the story of our life when lives are such strange and messy things? Frankly, why bother? In Tell the Truth. Make It Matter., a one-of-a-kind memoir workbook, Beth Kephart offers an insider's look at the making of true tales--and an illustrated workbook to guide the wild ride. Combining smartly selected samples with abundantly fresh ideas, dozens of original exercises with cautions, questions with answers, Kephart inspires, encourages, and persistently believes in those with a story to tell. Write this, the workbook says. Read this. Consider this. Discover who you are. Have some honest fun with words. Truth could not come from a more authoritative source--Beth Kephart, who, as an award-winning writer of 22 books, an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, a winner of the 2013 Books for a Better Life Award (motivational category) for Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir, a nationally renowned speaker, and a partner in Juncture Writing Workshops, has mastered the art of leading readers and writers toward the stories of themselves. Truth should find a home among high school teachers, college professors, workshop leaders, autodidacts, secret writers and public ones. It is the perfect (graduation, birthday, holiday, friendship) gift--to others, and to oneself.

On Haven, a six-mile long, half-mile-wide stretch of barrier island, Mira Banul and her Year-Rounder friends have proudly risen to every challenge. But then a superstorm defies all predictions and devastates the island, upending all logic and stranding Mira's mother and brother on the mainland. Nothing will ever be the same. A stranger appears in the wreck of Mira's home. A friend obsessed with vanishing disappears. As the mysteries deepen, Mira must find the strength to carry on-to somehow hold her memories in place while learning to trust a radically reinvented future. Gripping and poetic, This Is the Story of You is about the beauty of nature and the power of family, about finding hope in the wake of tragedy and recovery in the face of overwhelming loss.

Something is not right with Nadia Cara. While spending a year in Florence, Italy, she's become a thief. She has secrets. And when she tries to speak, the words seem far away. Nadia finds herself trapped by her own obsessions and following the trail of an elusive Italian boy whom only she has seen. Can Nadia be rescued or will she simply lose herself altogether? Set against the backdrop of a glimmering city, One Thing Stolen is an exploration of obsession, art, and a rare neurological disorder. It is also a celebration of language, beauty, imagination, and the salvation of love.

It is February 1983, and Berlin is a divided city with a miles-long barricade separating east from west. But the city isn’t the only thing that is divided. Ada lives among the rebels, punkers, and immigrants of Kreuzberg in West Berlin. Stefan lives in East Berlin, in a faceless apartment bunker of Friedrichshain. Bound by love and separated by circumstance, their only chance for a life together lies in a high-risk escape. But will Stefan find the courage to leap? Or will forces beyond his control stand in his way? National Book Award finalist Beth Kephart presents a story of daring and sacrifice in this three-starred reviewed Junior Library Guild Selection and Booklist Top 10 Historical Fiction for Youth.

Philadelphia has been at the heart of many books by award-winning author Beth Kephart, but none more so than the affectionate collection Love. This volume of personal essays and photographs celebrates the intersection of memory and place. Kephart writes lovingly, reflectively about what Philadelphia means to her. She muses about meandering on SEPTA trains, spending hours among the armor in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and taking shelter at Independence Mall during a downpour. In Love, Kephart shares her loveof Reading Terminal Market at Thanksgiving: “This abundant, bristling market is, in November, the most unlonesome place around.” She waxes poetic about the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, the mustard in a Salumeria sandwich, and the “coins slipped between the lips of Philbert the pig.” Kephart also extends her journeys to the suburbs, Glenside and Ardmore-and beyond, to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; Stone Harbor, New Jersey; and Wilmington, Delaware. What emerges is a valentine to the City of Brotherly Love and its environs. In Love, Philadelphia is “more than its icons, bigger than its tagline.”

Something is not right with Nadia Cara. While spending a year in Florence, Italy, she's become a thief. She has secrets. And when she tries to speak, the words seem far away. Nadia finds herself trapped by her own obsessions and following the trail of an elusive Italian boy whom only she has seen. Can Nadia be rescued or will she simply lose herself altogether? Set against the backdrop of a glimmering city, One Thing Stolen is an exploration of obsession, art and a rare neurological disorder. It is a celebration of language, beauty, imagination and the salvation of love.

From acclaimed writer Beth Kephart, author of A Slant of Sun, comes a short, imaginative telling of the life of the Schuylkill River, which has served as the source of Philadelphia's water, power, industry, and beauty for the city's entire life. Before that, it fed the indigenous people who preceded William Penn, and has since time immemorial shape our region.

In the tradition of Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, a critically acclaimed National Book Award finalist shares inspiration and practical advice for writing a memoir. Writing memoir is a deeply personal, and consequential, undertaking. As the acclaimed author of five memoirs spanning significant turning points in her life, Beth Kephart has been both blessed and bruised by the genre. In Handling the Truth, she thinks out loud about the form--on how it gets made, on what it means to make it, on the searing language of truth, on the thin line between remembering and imagining, and, finally, on the rights of memoirists. Drawing on proven writing lessons and classic examples, on the work of her students and on her own memories of weather, landscape, color, and love, Kephart probes the wrenching and essential questions that lie at the heart of memoir. A beautifully written work in its own right, Handling the Truth is Kephart's memoir-writing guide for those who read or seek to write the truth.