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Girls Got Game
Sports Stories & Poems
Editor and Contributor
Years ago, I came across two short story collections that planted the seeds for Girls Got Game. The first was Companions of Our Youth: Stories by Women for Young People's Magazines, 1865-1900, edited by Jane Benardete and Phyllis Moe (Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1980). The second was A Century of Children's Baseball Stories, edited by Debra Dagavarian (Stadium Books, 1990). Both books resurrected short stories from the past, and they fired my imagination with tales of days gone by.
Reading those anthologies inspired me to put together a contemporary collection of stories that reflect the presence of sports in girls’ lives. So I contacted authors—and some poets—who I knew or suspected had been athletes themselves. We ended up with an all-star team of contributors: Linnea Due, Virginia Euwer Wolff, Christa Champion, Felicia E. Halpert, Jacqueline Woodson, Nola Thacker, Nancy Boutilier, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, June A. English, Grace Butcher, Pat Connolly, and me!
Published by Henry Holt and Company, 2001 • 152 pages • Ages 10 & up • ISBN 0-8050-6568-7 • A Junior Library Guild Selection
Barbie: Shooting Hoops
How does a non-fiction author come to write a storybook featuring Barbie? It all started when my friend, Jackie Glasthal, called to tell me that Golden Books had decided to produce an Amazing Athlete series where Barbie played a different sport in each book. “We’re going to start with basketball.,” she said. “Do you want to write the book?”
I was never much of a Barbie fan—I always preferred playing sports to dolls—but this was a challenge that appealed to me. I named the two main characters after my niece Hannah and her best friend Crystal. And I named Coach Janssen after one of my favorite players from the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, Fran Janssen. Fran was particularly happy that the art director chose a redheaded doll to portray the coach. As a ballplayer, Fran’s nickname had been “Big Red,” due, of course, to the color of her hair.
Published by Golden Books, 1999 • 24 pages • Ages 4 to 7 • ISBN 0-307-13256-0
Play Like a Girl
A Celebration of Women In Sports
Edited With Jane Gottesman
Play Like a Girl is a love letter to female athletes. It’s not a big book, but it’s full of honest emotions and admiration for girls and women who play sports. It celebrates the way female athletes approach sports today—with joy and intensity and a feeling of ownership. That’s a great departure from their predecessors, who for much of the 20th century had to fight for the right to compete.
My co-editor, Jane Gottesman, was the curator of Game Face, a traveling museum exhibit and book project that presented photographic images of female athletes. For Play Like a Girl, Jane and I searched stories, poems, articles, and books for excerpts that presented sports from a female perspective. We paired those words with dramatic photographs to create a photo essay that aims to capture the power and the glory of the female athletic experience.
Published by Henry Holt and Company, 1999 • 32 pages • Ages 10 & up • ISBN 0-8050-6071-5