Meet-the-Author Recording with Lynn Curlee

The Great Nijinsky: God of Dance |

Lynn Curlee introduces and shares some of the backstory for creating The Great Nijinsky: God of Dance.

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Lynn Curlee: Hello, my name is Lynn Curlee. I'm the author/illustrator of a nonfiction book for young adults called The Great Nijinsky: God of Dance. When I was a young man in my early twenties, in New York City, I became a professional artist and I did a series of paintings of Nijinsky and the dancers in the circle around him. It was done as a group of gallery paintings. It was exhibited a few times and eventually most of them were sold. Later in life after I started doing books, the subject came back up as a sort of a natural and I had the old paintings to draw upon, to serve as illustrations. Plus, I added some new ones as well.

The process of assembling this book was just a wonderful one. The publisher, my wonderful editor, Yolanda Scott at Charlesbridge really committed the resources of her talent there in the publishing house and financially to make this book really a lavish book.

It's not your typical young adult nonfiction book.
It's not your typical children's book. It's something a little more elaborate. And that was the best part of the whole process was taking this thing, which began as an idea for a book and seeing it become something really lavish.

But this was just sort of a labor of love. I enjoyed the whole thing. I was really into the subject. The bulk of the illustration work was done many years ago. So it wasn't like a huge task at the end, but we spend a lot of time producing the book and putting it together.

This Meet-the-Author Recording with Lynn Curlee was exclusively created in July 2020 by TeachingBooks with thanks to Charlesbridge.