I look ahead to the year 2020 with great excitement as I embark on a great new adventure. My newest children’s storybook “Butterfly Dreams” is to be published by Et Alia Press this spring. http://www.etaliapress.com
https://www.etaliapress.com/carol-dabney
CAROL DABNEY
Carol Dabney is author and illustrator of Butterfly Dreams: A Friendship Takes Flight, forthcoming Spring 2020. She is the music teacher at Saint Mark’s Day School in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Raised on a forty-acre goat farm in the Ozarks, in her younger years Carol studied Italian opera, was “Miss Arkansas Teen,” and won a national talent award. She began her recording career in Nashville at the age of seventeen. She is the mother of five children and has nine grandchildren. In 1985, her family moved from the farm to the Hawaiian Islands, where she worked as a disc jockey at KFSH radio. She signed a singer song-writer contract with Paradise Records in Honolulu in 1997. Since her time in Hawaii, Carol plays the ukulele and takes it to all her events wherever she goes. When the family returned to Arkansas, she continued working as a music resource teacher presenting her unique style of interactive story-telling with puppets and art. Carol illustrates for several other children’s authors, and paints animal canvases and gift cards for her sister’s art gallery in California. Carol and her husband are the entertainers every year at the Arkansas State Capital Christmas lighting celebration. Together, they travel all over the state to entertain at festivals and community events.
Visit Carol at https://caroldabney.wordpress.com/
Carol Dabney reading and singing at a bookstores in Little Rock last summer.
(A note from Carol about editor publisher Erin Wood)
Little Rock Editor/Publisher Erin Wood is an amazing woman who comes alongside local Arkansas authors to help them realize their dreams. I am thankful for her encouraging guidance, creative ideas and marketing knowledge. We have just begun and its going to be such a fun year with her, her team and all the other other authors with Et Alia Press.
Together, we have been going over story line word by word to create a charming treasure for young readers and their families.
(About the book)
The story tales us about friendship through a little girl named Lily-Jane and a caterpillar named Carlos, who has big dreams to fly. He is often worried, but Lily-Jane tells him, “I think the size of your dream is just right.”
(About the art)
The artwork illustrations are colorful and children can follow a cute little basset hound from page to page to discover small creatures such as honeybees in the garden, frogs in the river and squirrels in the trees.
artwork I’ve painted is colorful, filled with lots of little creatures children can discover as the pages are turned. Butterflies and honeybees fly around a garden. The river winds around where there are some green frogs sitting on a log and a hound tags along fromone page tohe next where he sniffs out some bunnies or squirrels on the farm.
Will Carlos get his wings to fly? What will happen next? A tender friendship blooms while we are also learning all about the life-cycle of the amazing monarch butterflies.
(About the song)
As many of you know I am a music teacher in Little Rock. So of course I had to compose a song for this storybook. “Butterflies and Honeybees” gives light to how important these small creatures are as pollinators. I will be recording the song in a couple weeks with Rod at Blue Chair Recording and I’m truly excited that Tim Crouch will be playing violin and mandolin on the production. Tim won the fiddler of the year at the Arkansas Country Music Awards last June 3, 2019.
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(From my editor)
http://www.etaliapress.com
BUTTERFLY DREAMS: A FRIENDSHIP TAKES FLIGHT
Carol Dabney
We all have dreams, but what if they are too big?
After Lily-Jane helps her grandmother build a butterfly habitat, a close look at a caterpillar’s spots sends her stumbling in disbelief. “Me llamo Carlos,” says the charming little caterpillar, and an extraordinary friendship is born. Carlos teaches Lily-Jane his first language, Spanish, and Lily-Jane shares what she has learned about the miraculous life-cycle of the monarch butterfly. But when Carlos becomes trapped in his chrysalis, his dream of wings seems more out of reach than ever before.
As readers discover the tremendous power of encouraging words to nurture a friend past paralyzing self-doubt even when it means letting them go to fulfill their destiny, Carlos learns whether friendship and faith are enough to help him soar on the wings of a dream that may be just the right size.
You’ll love this book, accompanied by an original single, “Butterflies and Honey Bees,” by Little Rock’s favorite children’s music teacher, musician, and artist Carol Dabney.
Butterfly Dreams is ideal for classroom readings as students await butterflies emerging from their chrysalises as well as celebrations on the big day when butterflies are released into the sky to migrate south. It is also the perfect gift for coming of age, when a friend moves away, or any time someone needs an extra nudge of encouragement to dream big.
April, 2020
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I look forward to reading this story beginning this spring and have summertime programs already getting lined up at libraries and bookstores across Arkansas. Also have some classroom teachers who have asked me to read at their butterfly release parties this fall. All very exciting news to announce.
I am very blessed to be given this opportunity.
See you at a library soon.
Bring your wings – where new friendships will take flight!
-Carol
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