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.

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.

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 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.

Like a modern-day Cyrano de Bergerac, Elisa ghostwrites love notes for the boys in her school. But when Elisa falls for Theo Moses, things change fast. Theo asks for verses to court the lovely Lila--a girl known for her beauty, her popularity, and a cutting ability to remind Elisa that she has none of these. At home, Elisa's father, the one person she feels understands her, has left on an extended business trip. As the days grow shorter, Elisa worries that the increasingly urgent letters she sends her father won't bring him home. Like the undercover agent she feels she has become, Elisa retreats to a pond in the woods, where her talent for ice-skating gives her the confidence to come out from under cover and take center stage. But when Lila becomes jealous of Theo's friendship with Elisa, her revenge nearly destroys Elisa's ice-skating dreams and her plan to reunite her family.

National Book Award nominee Beth Kephart's first young adult novel is a stunning debut.

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.

Kids today seem to be under more competitive pressure than ever, while studies show that reading, writing, and the arts in schools are suffering. Is there any place for imagination in kids' lives anymore? In a dog-eat-dog world, why dream things that aren't there? In gorgeous prose and through personal stories, Beth Kephart resoundingly affirms the imagination as the heart of our ability to empathize with others, to appreciate the world, and to envision possibilities for the future. The star of her story is once again her son, Jeremy (as in her National Book Award-nominated A Slant of Sun), now fourteen years old—a child who at first resists storytelling, preferring more objective and orderly pursuits, but later leads a neighborhood book club/writing group and aspires to follow Steven Spielberg into moviemaking. Embedded in the text and appendices are examples of how to inspire children to read, write, and dream.

For Beth Kephart's son, the diagnosis was "pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified"--a broad spectrum of difficulties, including autistic features. As the author and her husband discover, all that label really means is that their son Jeremy is "different in a million wonderful ways, and also different in ways that need our help." In intimate, incandescent prose, Kephart shares the painful and inspiring experience of loving a child whose "special needs" bring tremendous frustration and incalculable rewards. "What, in the end, are you fighting for: Normal?" Kephart asks. "Is normal possible? Can it be defined? . . . And is normal superior to what the child inherently is, to what he aspires to, fights to become, every second of his day?" With the help of passionate parental involvement and the kindness of a few open hearts, Jeremy slowly emerges from a world of obsessive play rituals, atypical language constructions, endless pacing, and lonely frustrations. Triumphantly, he begins to engage others, describe his thoughts and passions, build essential friendships. Ultimately this is a story of the shallowness of medical labels compared to a child's courage and a mother's love, of which Kephart writes, "Nothing erodes it. It is not sand on a beach. It is the nuclear heart of things--hard as the rock of this earth."

A love story and a journey across the continents of marriage.

When Beth Kephart met and fell in love with the artist who would become her husband, she had little knowledge of the place he came from—an exotic coffee farm high in the jungle hills of El Salvador, a place of terrifying myths and even more frightening realities, of civil war and devastating earthquakes. Yet, marriage, she finds, means taking in not only the stranger who is one's lover but also a stranger's history—in this case, a country, language, people, and culture utterly foreign to a young American woman. Kephart's transcendently lyrical prose (often compared to the work of Annie Dillard) has already made her a National Book Award finalist. In each of her memoirs she has written about love, using her own life to seek out universal truths.

"Unclouding the lens through which she looks at her husband...becomes her difficult, powerful act of love" (Washington Post). Kephart's "lush...poetic evocation of Salvadorian life, its magic and tragedies" (Los Angeles Times) offers her testament to the ties that bind: to the chosen love of a man, and the necessary love of the place he comes from. "This luminous memoir [goes] deep into the territory of her marriage, and straight to the heart of the embattled, beautiful country her husband calls home" (Katrina Kenison). 19 b/w photographs. Reading group guide included.

"An exquisite gift, a poet's text on love, travel, spiritual sustenance, and the dark magic of El Salvador."—Jayne Anne Phillips

"With richly evocative prose than can only be called masterful, Beth Kephart illuminates here the questions we somehow keep forgetting to ask: how is it possible to fully love our mate without knowing and loving, too, where he or she was engendered? Still Love in Strange Places is a revelation and a feast!" —Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog

"I don't know how it is possible to take something as simple as words and make them into something as magnificent as this book, but Beth Kephart surely does. Here, again, is her exquisite devotion to language and to family. Here, again, is a book you will want to keep close at hand."—Sue Halpern, author of Four Wings and a Prayer

"In the best tradition of the memoir, Beth Kephart's Still Love in Strange Places intimately speaks to the reader about the daunting limits of memory, the irrepressible power of blood ties, and the impossible task of fully knowing those we love. Her exquisite prose, as sensuous as the El Salvador land she describes, conjures the wounds of an irretrievable past and offers the salve of wisdom, compassion, and promise." —Maria Laurino, author of Were You Always an Italian?: Ancestors and Other Icons of Italian America

Kenzie should be looking forward to prom and starting college in the fall, but instead she is mourning the loss of her father. Consumed by grief, she finds solace in the arms of her boyfriend, and she soon finds herself pregnant. Embarrassed, her mother sends her to southern Spain for the summer, where she will live out her pregnancy on a ranch and her baby will be adopted by a Spanish couple. Kenzie is at first sullen and difficult. But as she begins to open her eyes, and her heart, to the beauty that is all around, Kenzie must make important choices.

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."

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.

Flavored by the oddities of historic personalities and facts, 'Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent' is set in Bush Hill, Philadelphia, 1871 - home to the Baldwin Locomotive Works and a massive, gothic prison. Acclaimed writer Beth Kephart captures the rhythms and smells of an extraordinary era as William Quinn and his Ma, Essie, grapple with life among terrible accidents, miraculous escapes, and shams masquerading as truth.