In 1991, Dwyer & O’Grady sold Richard Michelson’s first children’s book, Did You Say Ghosts? which was listed by the New Yorker as a Best Book of 1993. Animals That Ought to Be was a Children’s Book Committee Book of the Year and Grandpa’s Gamble, was a Jewish Book Council Book of the Month. Both A Book of Flies: Real and Otherwise and Ten Times Better were named to The New York Public Library’s annual lists of “Best Children’s Books for Reading and Sharing.” The Detroit Jewish News cited Too Young for Yiddish, as “one of the best Jewish children’s books published in recent memory, and one of the top 25 ever published.” Skipping Stones magazine awarded Too Young for Yiddish its Multicultural Honor award, and the Association of Jewish Libraries listed it as a “Best of the Bunch.”

Rich’s forthcoming books include: Happy Feet: The Story of the Harlem Lindy Hoppers, illustrated by Coretta Scott King Award winner, E.B. Lewis, (Harcourt); O No Not Ghosts! (Harcourt); Tuttle’s Red Barn, illustrated by Caldecott Award winner, Mary Azarian (Putnam); Across the Alley (Putnam) also to be illustrated by E.B. Lewis; Busing Brewster (Knopf) and Their Legs Were Praying: Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King’s Amazing March Towards Freedom (Knopf).

Rich is also a prize-winning poet whose first book, Tap Dancing for the Relatives, was praised by Nobel Laureate Elie Weisel as “deeply moving.” Masks, a fine-art, limited edition book of Rich’s poetry and Leonard Baskin’s etchings, was published in June 2000. Counting to Six Million (University of Illinois Press) is forthcoming in 2005.

Rich’s poetry has appeared in many anthologies, among them The Norton Introduction to Poetry, Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust, Men of Our Time: Male Poetry in Contemporary America and Unsettling America: Contemporary American Multicultural Poetry.

Rich reviews children’s books for the New York Times Book Review, is the Curator of Exhibitions at The National Yiddish Book Center and is the owner of R. Michelson Galleries in Northampton, Massachusetts (www.RMichelson.com), where he represents many of the countries leading children’s book illustrators.