Betsy Rosenthal
Betsy Rosenthal is the author of six children’s books. Her middle grade novel in verse, Looking For Me in this great big family, has garnered numerous honors and awards. It was designated a Junior Library Guild Selection 2012, a Sydney Taylor Notable Book for Older Readers 2013, listed by Tablet Magazine under Best Children’s Books of 2012, was selected as a PJ Our Way book, and won the Children’s Literature Council’s Myra Cohn Livingston Award for Poetry.
Her picture books include My House Is Singing, It’s Not Worth Making a Tzimmes Over!, Which Shoes Would You Choose?, An Ambush of Tigers,a wild gathering of collective nouns, and Porcupine’s Picnic, who eats what? An Ambush of Tigers received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal and Kirkus. It was selected by Scholastic’s Instructor magazine as one of the 2015 50 Best Books for Summer, was listed as a Bank Street Center’s Best Children’s Books of the Year, is a 2015 Moonbeam Children’s Book Award bronze medal winner, a Huffington Post Best Children’s Books of 2015 honorable mention, winner of a 2015 Gelett Burgess Children’s Book Award, an American Library Association Notable Children’s Book 2016, winner of a 2016 Center for Excellence in Literacy Instruction Children’s Read Aloud Book Award, and was designated as a 2016 National Council of Teachers of English Notable Children’s Books in the English Language Arts. It is also a featured picture book in the newly published textbook for teachers, Picture-Perfect STEM (pub. by the National Science Teachers Assoc.).
Several of Rosenthal’s poems were selected by the U. S. Children’s Poet Laureate to be read in schools around the country as part of the poem a day program (poetryminute.org). Another one of her poems appears in the Poet Laureate’s anthology, One Minute till Bedtime (2016 Little Brown), which has garnered three starred reviews.
Rosenthal has also written a memoir of a prominent real estate developer and, calling on her background as a former lawyer, has written a book on navigating the legal system for lay people.
In addition, she has had many essays published in newspapers and magazines, including the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, Mothering magazine, The Jewish Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, California Monthly Magazine, and Working Writer.
When Rosenthal’s youngest child, who recently graduated, headed off to college, and her two college graduate children finally moved out, in a moment of temporary insanity, she went and adopted a puppy to keep her couch potato mutt company.