Monumental Verses

J. Patrick Lewis's poems include odes to such great monuments as Angkor Wat, the Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramid of Cheops, Hagia Sophia, the Great Wall of China, Mount Rushmore, and the Guggenheim Museum. Each poem and monument will have one spread, with 13 monuments being featured in this 32 page book. There will be a spread in the back of the book with a map showing the locations of the monuments along with brief historical information on each site, some background on the photographer, and history of the photograph.

J. Patrick Lewis earned his Ph.D. in Economics at The Ohio State University (1974) taught at Otterbein College in Westerville, Ohio until 1998.

He has published 38 children's picture books to date (6/04), 30 of them poetry or nonsense verse, with Creative Editions, Knopf, Atheneum, Penguin/Putnam Dial, Harcourt, Candlewick, Little, Brown, and Dawn Publications.

Lewis's poems have also appeared in Cricket, Spider, Ladybug, Cicada, Odyssey, Ranger Rick, Highlights for Children, Ms. Magazine, Your Big Backyard, Creative Classroom, Storytime, Storyworks, Chickadee, Ahoy, Journal of Children's Literature, Bookbird and over 70 anthologies. He wrote the 1992 National Children's Book Week poem, printed on one million bookmarks and distributed nationally. He also reviews children's books for The New York Times.

Lewis has three grown children and two grandchildren. He is now remarried and lives in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, with his wife Susan and two stepchildren. Lewis writes full-time, makes over fifty elementary school visits a year, keynotes at literature conferences, and presents teachers' workshops on introducing poetry in the classroom.

In 1972-73 he and his family spent the academic year in the former USSR, where Lewis completed his doctoral dissertation as an International Research and Exchanges (IREX) Fellow. He has three children: Beth, Matt and Leigh Ann. The Lewises were the first family to be accepted on this the largest cultural exchange program between the U.S. and the USSR. Lewis returned to Moscow and other Soviet cities for shorter stays in 1977, 1982, 1987, August 1991(during the failed coup), 1993, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2001 and 2004.

Lewis has published extensively in the field of Economics. His articles and reviews have appeared in numerous academic journals, as well as The Nation, Technology Review, The Progressive, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Cleveland Plain Dealer and other newspapers and magazines. He has had seven short stories and over seventy poems published in literary journals. In 1991 he was awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant for his adult poetry.