Slam Dunk: Poems About Basketball

by Lillian Morrison (Editor), Bill James (Illustrator)

Contains basketball poems that capture everything from the hush of an important foul-shot to the explosion of a last-minute three-pointer.

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Lillian Morrison's interest in poetry resulting from playing rhyming games with her friends such as jump rope and patty cake. As an adult, she wanted to make poetry fun and accessible for children. In her quest to become a writer, she earned one of her bachelor's degrees at Rutgers University in New Jersey and then another at Columbia University in New York.

She worked for many years at the New York Public Library in young adult services and was recognized as the recipient of the American Library Association's Grolier Award in 1987 for her contributions to stimulating the interests of young people through reading. She was particularly interested in folk rhymes, outdoor sports, dance, jazz and film, saying, "I love rhythms, the body movement implicit in poetry, explicit in sports--I am drawn to athletes, dancers, drummers, jazz musicians, who transcend misery and frustration and symbolize for us something joyous, ordered, and possible in life."

She spent nearly fifty years working at the New York Public Library and, during this time, also served as a lecturer at the schools where she developed her education, Rutgers and Columbia Universities.

Reviews

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is really cool! It has alot of interesting and extremely descriptive poems. It does have alot of poems about the same thing (shooting a basketball into a net), but it was also interesting to see different peoples poems. This also had some confusing words, but I used context clues to understand them.