Popcorn, corn on the cob, cornbread, tacos, tamales, and tortillas. All of these and many other good things come from one amazing plant. Aliki tells the story of corn: How Native American farmers thousands of years ago found and nourished a wild grass plant and made it an important part of their lives. They learned the best ways to grow and store and use its fat yellow kernels. And then they shared this knowledge with the new settlers of America.
Aliki is the author and illustrator of more than fifty books for children that are treasured by readers all over the world. Her many well-loved titles include My Visit to the Zoo, My Visit to the Aquarium, My Visit to the Dinosaurs, Wild and Woolly Mammoths, Tabby, and Those Summers. Aliki lives near the Globe theater, in London, England.
In Her Own Words..."Aliki grew up in Philadelphia in a big Greek family where everyone was busy creating and sharing their activities. She knew from the time she was in kindergarten that she wanted to bean artist, although music was also a natural talent. She was encouraged throughout her early life by her parents and by teachers she will never forget."She graduated from the Philadelphia Collegeof Art and started a career in advertising art. After she married Franz Brandenberg, Aliki continued her career in his country, Switzerland, where they lived for three years. It was there that she wrote and illustrated her first book, The Story of William Tell, which was published in England. When they moved to New York, Aliki wrote and illustrated My Five Senses--the book that changed the direction of her career and her life.
Although she had never thought of being a writer, Aliki has been making books ever since. Children's books, she says, are a combination of two things I love: words and pictures. I also love the privacy of books--both reading them and making them. Aliki writes fiction, in which she can express her feelings, and nonfiction research books about subjects she's interested in and wants to know more about. Each book is a new challenge; each is different, she says. The subject directs the way I illustrate a book, the same way friends bring out different parts of us. The challenge is to get the words right and then to make pictures that expand and enhance their meaning.""Besides her own books, Aliki has illustrated many written by Franz Brandenberg and other authors. Her two children are also in the arts. Jason is a filmmaker and Alexa is a children's book author-illustrator. They appear in almost all of her books as cats, mice, or themselves.
Aliki loves music, theater, cinema, museums, children, her cat, Nefertiti, and working in her garden in London, where she lives. She travels frequently to the U.S., Greece, Switzerland, and other parts of the world, though most of the time she is alone in her studio with the books she is working on--and Mozart."
