Crawley, Dave

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Crawley, Dave

Personal

Born in Frankfurt, Germany. Education: Washington and Lee University, B.A. (history); Emerson College, M.A. (mass communication). Hobbies and other interests: Writing children's poetry.

Addresses

Home—Pittsburgh, PA.

Career

Television reporter. WMTV-TV, Madison, WI, news anchor and reporter; KDKA-TV2, Pittsburgh, PA, reporter, 1988—. Writer and producer of documentary, Celebrating Fifty Years in Our Hometowns.

Awards, Honors

Nine Emmy awards for television work.

Writings

Cat Poems, illustrated by Tamara Petrosino, Wordsong/Boyds Mills Press (Honesdale, PA), 2005.

Dog Poems, illustrated by Tamara Petrosino, Wordsong/Boyds Mills Press (Honesdale, PA), 2007.

Also author of Sidelights on Wisconsin. Contributor of poems to anthologies, including Miles of Smiles, I Invited a Dragon to Dinner, My Teacher's in Detention, Rolling in the Aisles, If Kids Ruled the School, and Peter, Peter Pizza Eater. Contributor of poems to periodicals, including Jack and Jill, Cricket, Ranger Rick, and Spider.

Sidelights

Dave Crawley, an Emmy award-winning television journalist, published his first picture book, Cat Poems, in 2005. Crawley, who has garnered acclaim for his rhyming television features, also publishes his poetry in periodicals such as Jack and Jill and Cricket, and his poems have also been collected in anthologies.

In Cat Poems Crawley pays tribute to felines of all shapes, sizes, and colors. In the words of a Kirkus Reviews contributor, "this collection pairs two dozen rollicking rhymed tributes to the behavior and vagaries of cats with simple, vivacious cartoon portraits." Angoras, Persians, and numerous other breeds all star, courtesy of illustrator Tamara Petrosino. In "Sleeper," Crawley describes a cat in various states of repose—"She slouched on the couch./ She sprawled in the hall./ She curled in a ball on the stool by the wall."—while in "Mind Reader," he introduces a frisky feline that is pleased to learn that its owner would rather play than study. "Crawley utilizes line-ending rhyme schemes in the poems, and the familiar pattern will engage beginning or reluctant readers," observed Shawn Brommer, reviewing Cat Poems for School Library Journal. According to a critic in Publishers Weekly, "cat lovers will likely embrace Crawley's rhyming verse, which ad- dresses feline types and idiosyncrasies with unapologetic adoration."

Crawley told SATA: "I was in the fifth grade when I wrote my first poem, a silly little rhyme called ‘Lemon and Lime.’ I was so surprised at the result that I tried another, and another—and found that I could keep doing it! Since my parents wouldn't let me buy ice cream sandwiches (the only dessert then offered at my school), I began writing rhyming couplets for fellow students in return for bites of their ice cream sandwiches. Four lines, two bites. This was the first payment I ever received for my work.

"At the age of thirteen I wrote ‘An Ode to the Bucs,’ a rhyming play-by-play of the Pittsburgh Pirates' World-Series triumph over the powerful Yankees in 1960. It was printed in the Newport News Daily Press, the daily paper we received at our home in Hampton, Virginia. It was my first published work, some twenty-eight years before I would actually set foot in my current city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

"At age fourteen, I wrote a parody of Jimmy Dean's song ‘Big Bad John.’ My record, ‘Big Nik,’ was a spoof on Soviet Premiere Nikita Khruschev (‘Every morning

at the Kremlin you could see him arrive,/ He stood five-foot-three, weighed 385 …’ etc.). It created a local sensation at my then-home of Anchorage, Alaska (I was an Air Force brat), but missed a million seller by 999,900 records … give or take.

"Many stops later, I became ‘KD Country’ feature reporter at KDKA-TV, the CBS affiliate in Pittsburgh. I produce and report four stories a week, including an occasional story in rhyme. (To see a sampling, please log onto www.davecrawley.com and click on the ‘KDKA’ link.)

"About ten years ago, I began writing children's poems. When I had early success with magazines and anthologies, I thought ‘this is going to be easy.’ After my book ideas were rejected more than fifty times, humility set in. I owe thanks to Boyds Mills Press for trusting the work of a new author and publishing Cat Poems. Dog Poems naturally followed.

"Writing children's books has opened up a new world of school and library visits. Whereas my TV reports are performed for an unresponsive video camera, school visits give me the opportunity to interact with my audience. It has been a very rewarding experience. And nobody can erase me with a channel zapper!"