In twenty years of writing and illustrating, Diane Stanley has published more than thirty-five books for children of all ages. Stanley has collected countless awards along her creative path and written and illustrated an impressive number of books featuring powerful heroines that match the spirit of March's Women's history month.
Stanley's career has been influenced by the important women in her own life. The daughter of the writer, Fay Stanley, Diane grew up surrounded by artists. She studied medical illustration, but was unsure about this career. When she began reading aloud to her two young daughters, she knew children's book writing and illustration was everything she loved "in one attractive package."
Stanley has transformed the biography genre of children's literature for eight to twelve year olds from novels with a few line drawings to appealing colorfully written and illustrated books that make children wonder and dream. So far she has completed twelve biographies, and four of these are about great female leaders Cleopatra (Morrow, 1994), Good Queen Bess (Morrow 2001) The Last Princess: The Story of Princess Ka'iulani of Hawaii (HarperCollins, 1998) and Joan of Arc (HarperCollins, 1998).
Generally it takes Stanley a full year to write and illustrate her biographies. During that time, she immerses herself in the world and point of view of her focus character. She learns much about her focus heroines. For example, she learned that Cleopatra wasn't the Elizabeth Taylor beauty she once imagined. Stanley is particularly aware of illustrative accuracy and providing precise historical context whether she's capturing the Egyptian and Roman columns of Cleopatra's era, or the pearls and gathers of Elizabeth I's bodice. The illustrations are "the most challenging and time consuming" for good reason. Stanley feels "a child of today may be seeing something from the past for the first time, so it is absolutely necessary to make the pictures authentic." Her writing makes years of history and complicated events concise and intriguing. Being the first time deliverer of cultural literacy bears great responsibility.
Stanley is a writer who knows the power of story and chooses characters who "have an interesting life story. There are a lot of individuals who did many great things in history, but they're pretty boring as people." Stanley is deeply aware of her audience. She uses a "warts-and-all" approach in her biographies wanting to leave her young readers with both awe and flaw recognition.
Her keen responsibility and careful attention in non-fiction are balance in Stanley's playful fiction where her humor can be as rollicking as her biographies are serious. There's Sweetness, for example, a wise young Texas tyke who stars in two companion books Saving Sweetness (Putnam, 1996; ages 5-9 ) and Raising Sweetness (Putnam, 1999; ages 5-9). Stanley cuts loose with colorful images, strong dialect, and irony in these two tales of a young orphan who's gently guiding a clueless, caring sheriff who's trying to father her family of eight. Through Sweetness' eyes we watch these children suffer through tuna-fish soup and spaghetti with peanut butter because, as the narrating Sheriff puts it, "as long as I got a biscuit, they got half." Stanley's love of laughter and words shine from these funny pages and the book is a dream to read aloud for anyone who loves to dramatize.
Diane Stanley's also turned familiar female fairy tale characters into admirable heroines. In 1997 she published Rumplestiltskin's Daughter (Morrow, 1997; ages 5-10) righting a literary wrong that had bothered her from childhood. "I couldn't understand why anyone would marry someone who had just kidnapped you and forced you, under threat of death, to do something impossible. And why was the one person who helped her out portrayed as the heavy?" In Stanley's sequel, the miller's daughter has escaped the king, married Rumpelstiltskin and had a daughter. At sixteen, this daughter is faced with the exact situation, but she cooks up a plan to change the greedy king and feed his starving farmers. The heroine's name? Hope!
Diane Stanley's latest feat is redeeming the maligned Goldilocks in her newest book, Goldie and the Three Bears (HarperCollins, 2003; ages 3-7). Goldilocks, always a shadowy villain, becomes real in this story. We know her right away, for we've seen the type of very particular child. Goldie "knew exactly what she liked--and what she didn't." Stanley's illustrations promptly fill in the blanks with illustrations as the golden maned moppet is shown ordering from a menu, "I want plain pasta with just butter and no green things, please". Goldie wants her bath water, movies, and swing rides to be just right. She wants the perfect hat, a comfortable sweater, and shoes that don't pinch. This is a young woman who knows what she wants and she escapes being a prima donna because "when Goldie loved something, she loved it with all her heart." She loves her favorite snack, book and cozy bed. And she's looking for the perfect friend, one she can love "with all her heart."
Stanley serves her young audience well. She repeats this sweet catchy phrase, focuses on friendship which is always interesting to young children, and she remakes Goldie. Goldie doesn't enter the home of the bears as a break-and-enter boundary-pusher, she's just a lost young child who got off at the wrong bus stop, searching for comfort in a big, overwhelming world, and doing what she does best---discriminate! She goes through the strange home showing a preference for certain food, chairs, beds (without breaking a thing!) and finally discovers a little girl bear who prefers all the same things she does. Goldie's finally found a just-right friend and she knows this "with all her heart"!
Luckily for her many fans, Diane Stanley is an author who writes and illustrates for children of all ages with all her heart!
Short Takes: Diane Stanley writes more than picture books! Currently she has several novels in print, all developmentally great for their intended audiences. For younger audiences there's Roughing It and Joining the Boston Tea Party (HarperCollins; ages 5-8) these two adventures feature the Time-traveling Twins, Liz and Lennie. For slightly older readers, there's Mysterious Matter of I.M. Fine (HaperCollins; ages 9-12) in which Frannie and Beamer solve mysteries based on work of a horror story author. In A Time Apart (Morrow; ages 10--12) Thirteen-year-old Ginny is sent to live with her father in a reconstructed Iron Age village while her mother undergoes cancer treatments.