New Year at the Pier

April Halprin Wayland has been a teacher, a corporate manager, a fiddle player, and a walnut farmer, but she has always been a writer. She is the author of several picture books, among them the critically acclaimed New Year at the Pier, which won the Sydney Taylor Book Award gold medal for the best Jewish children’s book of the year, and a young adult novel-in-verse called Girl Coming in for a Landing, which won both the Lee Bennet Hopkins Honor Award for Children’s Poetry and the Myra Cohn Livingston Award. April and her family celebrate the new year on a pier near Los Angeles, California. Her website, aprilwayland.com, includes student activities based on her books.

Stéphane Jorisch has illustrated numerous picture books, including the critically acclaimed Betty Bunny series, New Year at the Pier, Granddad’s Fishing Buddy, The Real Story of Stone Soup, and Jabberwocky, for which he won the prestigious Governor General’s Award, the Canadian equivalent of the Caldecott. Mr. Jorisch lives with his wife and three children in Montreal, Canada.