2008 December 01: Review from Booklist for The Bear Makers:.
"...Mining her own family's history, Cheng has crafted a cast of characters and palpable setting that are vivid and compelling, and she offers a glimpse into history that many children will find easy to relate to and powerfully affecting."

2008 September: Article from The Horn Book Magazine, "Teachers I Remember" http://www.hbook.com/magazine/articles/2008/sep08_smith.asp

"...I fall in love with the good teachers in books (and, really, there are few bad teachers in books for young elementary students), especially when I share their stories aloud with my students.

...This year, a new teacher joined the pantheon of beloved teachers who populate my own personal Mount Olympus: Miss D., from Andrea Cheng’s Where the Steps Were. She teaches in an old inner-city school that is about to be shut down. She listens to her children, who face a variety of struggles, while the clock keeps ticking closer to the end of the year and the end of their community. Though Miss D. reveals some of her personal struggles to her students, the students are the center of her school life, and they know it. Miss D. loves poetry and stories and introduces her children to literature, from Stone Soup and A Chair for My Mother to Langston Hughes’s “Dreams” and “Merry-Go-Round” and Eloise Greenfield’s “Harriet Tubman.” Ding! I rededicate myself to morning poetry reading when I see my own students seek out and react to the poems Miss D. references. Like Miss Agnes’s children, Miss D.’s third graders form a bond with one another that will endure well past the demolition of their school, and my students bonded with them, too. They wanted to count change, make scratch paintings, and cook school soup the way those kids did. And, at the end of the year, they wanted me to read those poems, one more time." -Robin Smith

2008 Mar 03: * Starred Review from Publishers Weekly for Where the Steps Were:.
"In a spare, eloquent novel in verse illustrated with her own bold block prints, Cheng (Marika) captures the moods of five inner-city third-graders ...Mixing sad and uplifting images occurring between the fall and spring of a school year, these poems pay tribute to hard-working educators and children learning to overcome obstacles and accept unwelcome changes."

2008 Feb 09: * Starred Review from Kirkus Reviews for Where the Steps Were:.
"Cheng's free-verse poems give voice to the children, allowing them to speak their hopes, frustrations and fears; her powerful, blocky woodcuts accompany the poems, intensifying their emotional impact.---Quietly lovely."

2007 Nov 16: Television Interview with Andrea (It takes a few seconds to load): http://www.cetconnect.org/cetconnect_video.asp?ID=1706

2008 March: Where the Steps Were is now available from Wordsong.

2008 November: The Bear Makers is here! .

Calendar

2009 May 04-06: Andrea presents at the at the International Reading Association national convention in Minneapolis.

2008 Jul 16: Andrea presents at the Mazza Museum in Findlay, Ohio; Wednesday, July 16, 2008.