SATA

PERSONAL

Born May 28, 1958, in Gorham, ME; married; children: two.

ADDRESS

• Home - Gorham, ME.

CAREER

Author and educator. Greely Junior High School, Cumberland, ME, teacher (retired, 2018).

Sports feature of the year award, Highlights for Children, 2004, for “Baseball Smarts”; Children’s Books of the Year selection, Bank Street College of Education, Carter G. Woodson Book Award, National Council for the Social Studies, Children’s Book Award and Notable Books for a Global Society selection, both International Reading Association, and Myers Outstanding Book Award honorable mention, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America, all 2007, all for Louis Sockalexis; outstanding merit award, Bank Street College of Education, for Silent Star.

WRITINGS

• Whodunit Math Puzzles, illustrated by Lucy Corvino, Sterling (New York, NY), 2001
• (With Hy Conrad and Bob Peterson) Mensa Whodunits, Main Street (New York, NY), 2004
• Louis Sockalexis: Native American Baseball Pioneer, illustrated by Bill Farnsworth, Lee & Low Books (New York, NY), 2007
• Silent Star: The Story of Deaf Major Leaguer William Hoy, illustrated by Adam Gustavson, Lee & Low Books (New York, NY), 2012
• If You Played Hide-and-Seek with a Chameleon, illustrated by Rebecca Evans, Dawn (Nevada City, CA), 2019
• If Animals Built Your House, illustrated by Rebecca Evans, Dawn Publications (Naperville, IL), 2020
• "HILARIOUSLY SIMPLE MATH" SERIES
• The Clock Problem: How to Tell Time, illustrated by Davilyn Lynch, Clavis (New York, NY), 2024
• The Pigpen Problem: How to Calculate Area and Perimeter, illustrated by Davilyn Lynch, Clavis (New York, NY), 2024
• The Cake Problem: Equivalent and Simplified Fractions, illustrated by Davilyn Lynch, Clavis (New York, NY), 2025

Contributor to periodicals, including Highlights for Children and Scholastic magazines.

SIDELIGHTS

A longtime middle-school teacher, Bill Wise has written an assortment of children’s books featuring puzzles, baseball players, animal abilities, and mathematical concepts. Wise retired from teaching at Greely Junior High School, in Cumberland, Maine, in 2018.

Wise shares his enthusiasm for the sport of baseball in the picture books Louis Sockalexis: Native American Baseball Pioneer and Silent Star: The Story of Deaf Major Leaguer William Hoy. A native of Maine, Wise first learned about Sockalexis as a teenager while he was researching a report on major-league ballplayers from his home state. “I have been an avid baseball fan since I was ten years old,” he explained during an interview with Lee & Low Books. “I’ve read hundreds of baseball books—both fiction and nonfiction—and have seen every baseball movie ever made. I’ve always been captivated by the rich history—the legendary players, the memorable stories, the benchmark records of the sport.”

In Louis Sockalexis, Wise chronicles the life of the first Native American to play major-league baseball. Born in 1871 on the Penobscot Indian reservation near Old Town, Maine, Sockalexis excelled in athletics at Holy Cross College and signed with the Cleveland Spiders of the National League in 1897. Although he often faced discrimination from opposing fans, he proved to be a marvelous talent: in his very first at-bat he hit a home run and ended the season with a stellar .338 batting average. A critic in Publishers Weekly called Louis Sockalexis a “solid debut picture book” and in School Library Journal, Marilyn Taniguchi suggested that Wise’s “finely crafted look at a little-known sports pioneer should intrigue a wide audience of readers.”

In Silent Star, Wise introduces readers to William Hoy, an outfielder who signed with the Washington Nationals in 1888 and collected more than 2,000 hits over his long and distinguished career. Hoy lost his hearing after contracting meningitis, but he learned American Sign Language and played baseball at a school for the deaf. Many baseball historians have attributed this deaf major leaguer’s success to the sport’s extensive use of hand signals. Praising the book as “succinctly told,” Linda Perkins noted in Booklist that the “dramatic opening scene” will particularly captivate readers. Dean Schneider observed in School Library Journal that Silent Star “celebrates the courage and determination” of a baseball legend, and a Kirkus Reviews critic praised Wise for “employing rich descriptive language with just the right combination of drama and information.”

In another interview with a contributor to the Lee & Low Books website, Wise compared the protagonist of Silent Star with the protagonist of his previous book. He stated, “I’ve always been captivated by the rich history of baseball. Like Louis Sockalexis, William Hoy was a man of great courage who showed indomitable determination and overcame many obstacles to play the sport he loved.” Wise continued, “I believe their stories are of great importance and need to be shared with young readers.”

Wise shifts away from baseball with his 2019 book on animals, If You Played Hide-and-Seek with a Chameleon, illustrated by Rebecca Evans. The book highlights the abilities of various types of animals, comparing their performance with that of humans in several different sports and games. In weightlifting, elephants would easily best humans. In the long jump, kangaroos would win. Anacondas would be especially good at wrestling, while octopi would be excellent Twister players. Because giraffes are so tall, they could make great basketball players. At the end of the volume, readers are encouraged to compare animals and humans in other sports and games. A Kirkus Reviews writer deemed If You Played Hide-and-Seek with a Chameleon “fascinating”: “Even speedy, strong, flexible, and athletic kids are sure to walk away from this humbled by the talent in the animal kingdom.”

[open new]Wise highlights more intriguing animal abilities in If Animals Built Your House. Five youths with hardhats and flashlights are given an eye-opening tour of Fin & Claw Village, letting them step inside a wide variety of animal homes, many constructed by the animals themselves. The termite mound is full of tunnels, the honeybee colony has cramped bedrooms, the beaver dam has flooding issues, and the polar bear cave needs no air conditioning. With each home, a flashy sentence sets the scene, followed by a paragraph with more details. Other animals visited include alligators, chimpanzees, red groupers, satin bowerbirds, tree frogs, tree squirrels, and pack rats. Appreciating how the informational paragraphs “focus on keeping kids’ attention and are often humorous,” a Kirkus Reviews writer concluded that “readers will surely pay closer attention on nature walks.” Affirming that the “robust back matter,” including lesson activities, makes If Animals Built Your House “suitable for classroom or at-home educational use,” Booklist reviewer Miriam Aronin praised the book’s “fun, whimsical approach to nonfiction.”

Wise further tapped his talents as a teacher in launching the “Hilariously Simple Math” series, breaking down basic concepts for later elementary-age readers. The Clock Problem: How to Tell Time finds Farmer Ed rather upset that Chicken showed up late for a meeting, even though an analog clock hangs in plain sight in the barn. With Boxer Brutus scheduled to teach Chicken a lesson “once and for all” in just an hour—at 10 a.m.—Sheep kindly steps up, drawing diagrams to help the fearful Chicken figure out what the circle of numbers and moving lines mean ahead of time. Meanwhile Goat supplements the session with barnyard puns, a sassy attitude, and some wacky suggestions. A Kirkus Reviews writer found in The Clock Problem “goofy humor but real, relatable anxiety, soothed by a calm, reasonably effective teacher.”

Farmer Ed offloads his proprietary responsibilities in The Pigpen Problem: How to Calculate Area and Perimeter, demanding that Sheep, Goat, and Chicken build him a pigpen or else forfeit their beloved barn dance. Given 20 feet of fencing, Goat hastily hammers out a sty measuring 9 feet by 1 feet—and looking too small for even a single pig. But Sheep has the formula for area, length times width, and as Goat gradually adjusts the size—to 8 by 2, 7 by 3, etc.—they eventually figure out the maximum size. Then Farmer Ed springs another demand: for a triangular pen of 100 square feet! The back matter disregards the tricky triangle problem but otherwise more fully explains area and perimeter. A Kirkus Reviews writer remarked that “the jokes are corn-fed, the math clear” in this “practical and entertaining introduction to plane geometry.”

The Cake Problem: Equivalent and Simplified Fractions revolves around a delectable dilemma. Sheep, Goat, and Chicken are stymied over how to evenly divide a hexagonal cake between the three of them. Goat again takes action at once, but the portions come out uneven, so Sheep turns to the chalkboard to explain how fractions work. Since two-sixths equals one-third, fair cake allotment is imminent. A Kirkus Reviews writer opined that readers “who can stomach the outrageously antique Dad jokes will find this a tasty treat”: “clearly explained” concepts add up to “math made funny and engaging.”[close new]

BIOCRIT

PERIODICALS

• Booklist, July 1, 2007, GraceAnne A. DeCandido, review of Louis Sockalexis: Native American Baseball Pioneer, p. 53; June 1, 2012, Linda Perkins, review of Silent Star: The Story of Deaf Major Leaguer William Hoy, p. 88; November 1, 2020, Miriam Aronin, review of If Animals Built Your House, p. 50.

• Horn Book, May-June, 2012, Dean Schneider, review of Silent Star, p. 121.

• Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2007, review of Louis Sockalexis; March 15, 2012, review of Silent Star; June 15, 2019, review of If You Played Hide-and-Seek with a Chameleon; November 1, 2020, review of If Animals Built Your House; June 15, 2024, review of The Clock Problem: How to Tell Time; August 15, 2024, review of The Pigpen Problem: How to Calculate Area and Perimeter; April 15, 2025, review of The Cake Problem: Equivalent and Simplified Fractions.

• School Library Journal, May, 2007, Marilyn Taniguchi, review of Louis Sockalexis, p. 127.

ONLINE

• Bill Wise website, https://billwiseauthor.com/ (August 6, 2019).

• Gab with the Gazette, http://blog.inthegazette.com/ (April 18, 2008), Cliff White, author interview.

• Lee & Low Books website, http://www.leeandlow.com/ (August 1, 2008), “Booktalk with Bill Wise and Bill Farnsworth;” (August 6, 2019), author interview.

• Publishers Weekly, http://www.publishersweekly.com/ (April 9, 2007), review of Louis Sockalexis.