Books with author Jennifer Owings Dewey

It is the windiest, coldest, most forbidding region on earth, and I am heading straight for it.Sketchbook in hand, an artist leaves home to spend four months in Antarctica. She hikes up glaciers, camps on deserted islands, and sees mirages of castles in the air. She sails past icebergs and humpback whales. And she fills her sketchbook with drawings of penguin chicks huddled in their nests and seals basking in the sun. Jennifer Dewey's sketches, photographs, journal entries, and letters home let you see the last great wilderness on earth through the eyes of an artist at work.

Now available only from UNM Press, Stories on Stone introduces young readers to the rich history and mystery of rock art in the Southwest. As a youngster growing up in the American Southwest, Jennifer Dewey became fascinated with the images she saw carved in stone years before by the area's natives. For this book, Dewey has produced original color drawings that vividly recreate the images painted and carved into rocks centuries ago. Dewey explores who the original artists were and what their rock art meant, introducing young readers to the beauty and mystery of these images and stories on stone. Dewey begins by pointing out that rock art is a mysterious but readable record of early human history in the Southwest. The author goes on to describe how rock art images came to be chipped and etched on stone and suggests some of the likely inspiration behind the images. Throughout the book, Dewey helps readers encounter the past with respect and understanding while opening their imagination to the stories told in these ancient works of art. This striking book will appeal to anyone wanting to share the power of rock art's ability to intrigue."What could be a dry and difficult subject is made enjoyable in a brief, readable text surrounded by Dewey's soft monochromatic illustrations of common rock art subjects. This attractive book will provide background knowledge for families who are planning to visit the Southwest and could be used in the classroom as enrichment for a unit on ancient cultures."--BooklistAges 7 and up; reading level grade 6

When Jennifer Owings Dewey and her husband adopted the orphaned raven they named Clem, he was six inches long, cold, wet, and ugly. They made him a nest in a cardboard box lined with soft fabric, fed him twelve times a day, and fell in love with him. Eventually he learned to eat chocolate ice cream, which he demanded every day.First published in 1986, Dewey's straightforward account of Clem's first year, illustrated with her beautiful drawings, won an award from the National Association of Science Teachers as an Outstanding Science Book for Children. But any adult interested in birds will enjoy these vivid observations of one little corvid's development and his relationships with other creatures in the Dewey household, including a bull snake, a burrowing owl named Clyde, and the Dewey family's own daughter, Tamar.

Life at the pond is seen as one subsuming force that fills all with vigor and diversity. Sun rays touch the surface and stir everything into motion. Land and water meet at the edge, where the water shrew makes its home. Territorial circles are made throughout by the creatures that live there… Simple, realistic illustrations of green, yellow and brown are suitable and eloquent accompaniment. –Publishers Weekly

One day a spider appeared on the window ledge outside the glass. Right away she began to spin a web. Thus begins an inspiring true story―a story of an expectant mother who develops an unexpected relationship with the spider that makes a home outside her window. As the summer and the mother's pregnancy progress, the spider is beginning its own circle of life. From its first graceful web, to its creation of a delicate egg sac, the spider lives through the fall season, and what should be the end of its life. But by a small miracle of nature, the orb weaver endures the snow and the winter, and stays with her eggs until spring. This gentle story with strikingly detailed illustrations reveals the exceptional magic in the everyday world, and how it can touch our lives. The parallel stories of the human mother and the spider show how stopping to observe nature can allow you to witness everyday miracles. Additional in-depth information on spiders is included in an afterword.

At the age of nine, the author was bitten by a rattlesnake and thought the local hospital had no antivenin, she managed to survive. A year later she observed Hopi snake dances and saw the Hopi hold rattlers in their mouths while performing a rain dance. As an adult she witnessed the "rattlesnake dance" between two male rattlers vying for superiority. The author writes with candor and grace of her encounters with rattlesnakes, and the stories she relates are illustrated with powerful color drawings.