For Jerry Pinkney's bunch, books bind a literary dynasty

[Blue_Tires]

CROTON-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — As a child in an all-black Philadelphia neighborhood, Jerry Pinkney loved to draw and paint. But, he says, "I didn't have the slightest clue that anyone could make a living doing that."
At 70, Pinkney is the writer and illustrator of more than 100 books, most of them for children, many of them about African-American history.

He also is the patriarch of the first family of children's literature. His family's name is on the covers of about 175 books.

Jerry's wife, Gloria Jean Pinkney, also is an author. Their oldest son, Brian, writes and illustrates. Brian's wife, Andrea Davis Pinkney, is a novelist and editor at Scholastic Books.

Brian's younger brother, Myles, a photographer, collaborates with his wife, Sandra, on a series of multicultural picture books.

"It's a dynasty," says poet Nikki Grimes.

Last month, Jerry Pinkney won the Caldecott Medal, the American Library Association's top prize for picture books, for The Lion & the Mouse, a visual retelling of Aesop's fable.


ROUNDUP: African-American history for young readers

During a visit to Pinkney's studio near his home, 35 miles north of Manhattan, he and Gloria, along with Brian and Andrea, who had traveled from Brooklyn, talked about the family business of writing and illustrating.

Jerry Pinkney was 12 when he got an after-school job at a newsstand at "$6 a week; $3 went right to my mother." His father was a self-taught jack-of-all-trades whose education ended in elementary school.

Pinkney struggled in school ("today, they'd call it dyslexia"), but he loved art and carried a sketchbook. One day at the newsstand, a white customer complimented him on his art.

The customer was cartoonist John Liney, who drew the Henry comic strip from 1948 to 1979.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2010-02-04-pinkney04_CV_N.htm