The Tomato Collection

Since this week’s topic is children’s poetry, I thought it would be appropriate to share one of my favorites. After doing the reading for this week, I was immediately reminded of children’s poet Kevin Kammeraad and went home to find his book, The Tomato Collection. This poet gave a presentation at my elementary school when I was in 5th grade and I bought an autographed copy of his book. The illustrations and photographs in this book are some of the most creative I have seen. There is an extremely diverse range of poems from his laugh-out-loud Little Low One to his senseless Norwood to his inspirational Natalie. There are so many wonderful poems in this collection and I encourage you to read some of them on his website.

Kammeraad grew up in Michigan and went to school at Grand Valley State University. I think that supporting local authors is really important and I hope that you all enjoy his poems as much as I do. I looked up his website to see if he had published anything since that presentation nine years ago and it turns out that he has two other poetry collections (A Curious Glimpse of Michigan and I Remember…) and was an illustrator for the book How Much Wood Could A Woodchuck Chuck.