Orel Protopopescu

Orel Protopopescu, award-winning children’s author and poet, has been published by major houses. A Thousand Peaks, Poems from China (with Siyu Liu) was selected for the New York Public Library’s Books for the Teen Age, 2003 list. Two Sticks is on Bank Street College of Education’s Best Children’s Books of the Year 2008 list. Thelonious Mouse (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011) is her second, highly-praised collaboration with the illustrator Anne Wilsdorf and the winner of the Crystal Kite Award, 2012, for SCBWI, NY Metro region. Her book for teachers, Metaphors & Similes You Can Eat and Twelve More Poetry Writing Lessons (Scholastic, 2003) has inspired thousands of wonderful poems from children in grades 4-8.

Her poetry for adults has appeared in several reviews, most prominently in Oberon where she won several awards, a first honorable mention from the Pulitzer prize-winning poet Louis Simpson and first prize in the 2010 contest, judged by L. S. Asekoff, for the poem, “Listening to My Favorite Things from the Best of John Coltrane”. Her chapbook, What Remains (2011), was published by Finishing Line Press.

Her first two picture books, Since Lulu Learned the Cancan and The Perilous Pit, are now iPad apps from Auryn, Inc. Her interactive, animated, bilingual poetry app for children (April, 2013) features spring poems she wrote and translated into French. A Word’s A Bird, Spring Flies By in Rhymes, was produced by Syntonie, an imprint of Actialuna, and is illustrated by Jeanne B. de Sainte Marie. She will be sharing the app as a visiting poet at Marymount School, Paris, in April, 2013, as well as at the American School of Paris, her second visit to that school. Orel, a native speaker of English, is fluent in French and she and her husband, Serban, have lived in France for extended periods. They have a grandson not yet old enough to read in any language, but he loves the singing ducks in her application.

A gifted and nurturing teacher, Orel conducts writing workshops for students and teachers. As a former student, Christine Slatest, now a 7th grade English teacher, said, “My interest in writing poetry began in Mrs. Protopopescu’s workshops. Her visits to my elementary school changed my life.”