Today I speak with Annette Bay Pimentel about her writing career, and celebrate her new book, Before Music: Where Instruments Come From (Abrams, 2023). Annette grew up mostly in Utah in a large, boisterous family. She graduated with an undergraduate degree from University of California Berkeley and a graduate degree from Brandeis University in English literature. She and her husband raised six musical-instrument-playing children.

Annette’s books are often on state young reader’s lists and have been Junior Library Guild Selections. All the Way to the Top won a Schneider Honor from the American Library Association. Pura’s Cuentos won the Goddard/Riverside Social Justice Award. Mountain Chef won the Carter G. Woodson Award. She is also the author of Girl Running. She is represented by Kathleen Rushall of Andrea Brown Literary.

Mel Rosenberg is a professor emeritus of microbiology (Tel Aviv University, emeritus) who fell in love with children's books as a small child and now writes his own. He is co-founder of Ourboox, a web platform with some 240,000 ebooks that allows anyone to create and share flipbooks comprising text, pictures and videos.

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