Anne Isaacs  Anne Isaacs (born March 2, 1949) is an American writer of children's and young adult literature. She may be known best as the writer of "Swamp Angel", a picture book illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky and published by Dutton Children's Books in 1994; Zelinsky was a runner-up for the annual Caldecott Medal. In 2014 "Swamp Angel" was a runner-up (Honor Book) for the Phoenix Picture Book Award from the Children's Literature Association, which annually recognizes the best picture book that did not win a major award 20 years earlier. "Books are considered not only for the quality of their illustrations, but for the way pictures and text work together." Isaacs was born in 1949, in Buffalo, New York, and lived there until she left for college in 1967. She attended the University of Michigan, where she received bachelor's degrees in English Literature and Environmental Education and her MS in 1975. Since then she has lived in various cities in Canada and in California. Isaacs married Samuel Koplowicz, a media producer, in 1978. She and her husband and three kids now live in Berkeley, on the San Francisco Bay. Writing fiction is her second profession as she held a series of positions in the field of environmental education until the mid-1980s. "All my life", says Isaacs, "poetry has affected me more than any other genre. I have read and memorized it, studied it, loved, and written it since I was nine." As a child she has called herself "shy and usually lost in a world of my imagination. I read constantly from fourth grade on, plucking books haphazardly from my parents' or the library's shelves: "Romeo and Juliet", "Lorna Doone", "Wind in the Willows", "The Caine Mutiny". In fourth grade I was changed forever by my first readings of Shakespeare and Coleridge. I was spellbound by their emotional directness, interweaving of thought and feeling, and above, all, the pure music of their words. I read "Little Women" more times than any other book. Like the heroine, Jo, I grew up to combine careers as an educator, mother, and children's book writer." Isaacs dabbled in writing as a child, but it wasn't until she had children of her own that she began to write seriously, and to think about trying to get a book published. She has said "I seem fated to come to books in reverse order.