Margarita Engle

Today we have a mini mistake poem by IMPERFECT poet Margarita Engle, who was recently nominated for the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Award. We don't have any Pippi Longstocking mini mistake poems yet, but wouldn't those be cool?

Margarita's poem gets to the heart of not giving up:

Revision Blues
a tanka

the first draft
that flowed so easily
now needs
hard work, this painstaking
attention to details

MARGARITA ENGLE is the 2017-2019 national Young People’s Poet Laureate, and the first Latino to receive that honor. She is the Cuban-American author of many verse novels, including The Surrender Tree, a Newbery Honor winner, and The Lightning Dreamer, a PEN USA Award recipient. Her verse memoir, Enchanted Air, received the Pura Belpré Award, Golden Kite Award, Walter Dean Myers Honor, Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, and Arnold Adoff Poetry Award, among others. Drum Dream Girl received the Charlotte Zolotow Award for best picture book text.

Her newest verse novel about the island is Forest World, and her newest picture books are All the Way to Havana, and Miguel’s Brave Knight, Young Cervantes and His Dream of Don Quixote.

Books forthcoming in 2018 include The Flying Girl, How Aída de Acosta learned to Soar, and Jazz Owls, a Novel of the Zoot Suit Riots.

Margarita was born in Los Angeles, but developed a deep attachment to her mother’s homeland during childhood summers with relatives. She was trained as an agronomist and botanist. She lives in central California with her husband. Follow her on Twitter at @YPPLaureate