Paul Fleischman
1 book analyzed
Biography
Paul Fleischman (born 1952) is the son of children's author Sid Fleischman, and he grew up in a household where language was craft and storytelling was daily practice. He won the Newbery Medal for Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices (1989), a collection designed to be read aloud by two speakers simultaneously — an early experiment in the multi-voice structure that would define Seedfolks. Fleischman has said that he conceived Seedfolks after visiting community gardens and being struck by how they functioned as informal social laboratories where people who would never otherwise interact were forced into proximity. He deliberately chose thirteen narrators of different ages, ethnicities, and circumstances to mirror the diversity he observed in real urban gardens.