It’s time for a rock star celebration of Sandra Neil Wallace’s new PB biography,
Rock Star: How Ursula Marvin Mapped Moon Rocks and Meteorites
illustrated by Nancy Carpenter (Simon & Schuster/Paula Wiseman Books)
which releases October 14th!
*Still time to Pre-Order Here!*
“A giant among geologists breaks new ground.“
“Ursula Marvin (1921-2018) was an intrepid adventurer from the start…Sharp, capable, and undeterred by the sexist stumbling blocks meant to thwart her, Marvin became the first female scientist to hunt the harsh landscape of Antarctica for meteorites, chasing the adventure she’d hungered for since childhood…A luminous tribute befitting a brilliant trailblazer.” —STARRED Kirkus Review
About the Author
Sandra Neil Wallace writes about people who break barriers and change the world. Her true stories for young readers have received 20 starred reviews and won several national awards including the Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Between the Lines: How Ernie Barnes Went from the Football Field to the Art Gallery, and the NSTA Outstanding Science Trade Book for Marjory Saves the Everglades. A former ESPN reporter and the first woman to host an NHL broadcast on national TV, she continues to break barriers and create change as co-founder of The Daily Good, which supports thousands of students through global food pantries and literacy programs in New Hampshire.
Let’s ask some questions.
Discovering Ursula Marvin
Q 1. How and when did you first learn about Ursula Marvin and her discoveries? Is she well-known in Vermont, and New Hampshire–where you live?
SNW: I first learned about Ursula Marvin reading her obituary in the New York Times in 2018. I was struck by what a giant she was in the field of geology and space science. Examining samples from each Apollo moon mission—Ursula literally waited on Earth for the rock box astronaut Neil Armstrong was filling up with lunar specimens—she uncovered new science about the moon.
From discovering what caused moon craters (impact events), to helping develop the Magma Ocean Theory that re-shaped what scientists know about the moon’s and the solar system’s beginnings, here was a New Englander, a Vermonter who’d grown up just a few hours from where I live in New Hampshire. She became the first woman to search for meteorites in Antarctica, yet I’d never heard of her.
Even though I focus on uncovering the stories of trailblazers hidden in history, I was still astonished that Ursula wasn’t even known in her home state. Learning about Rock Star, Vermont museums are reaching out to me asking for more information about Ursula Marvin.
Digging in…
Q 2. What was your research like for this project?
SNW: This was my tenth nonfiction book to investigate, and I’d anticipated the research experience to be smoother and with easier access to material. No more private collections to track down. No cold calls digging for hidden material or primary sources.
Those skills had been my superpower during my career as a journalist and for most of my previous books, but now I was going to be conducting research at one of the biggest archives in the world—the Smithsonian! The institution’s own supervisory archivist had personally acquired the Ursula B. Marvin collection, and I couldn’t wait to visit.
Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and the archives shut down to in-person visits. So, I became an intrepid reporter again, conducting phone interviews and logging nearly one hundred email conversations with scientists and explorers who had worked with Ursula. This really grounded Ursula’s importance in history for me and provided the context I needed when reading Ursula’s own Antarctica ice journals which, fortunately, had been digitized just before the pandemic hit.
Sifting through…
Q 3. Writing a nonfiction picture book requires sifting through so many amazing facts and choosing which to feature in 28 or 44 pages. Are there any scenes you had to cut during revisions?
SNW: With only a few images of Ursula available to me—the Smithsonian hadn’t yet digitized most of them—I turned to Ursula’s family and their personal collection of photographs. It’s how I learned that Ursula skijored as a child over icy Vermont potato fields and how much she loved to explore the mountains with her beloved pet companions, Nita the Saint Bernard, and Coolidge the cat.
I especially adored a photo Ursula’s niece sent me of four-year-old Ursula hugging Coolidge the cat—so much so that I wrote more about the duo than what appears in the pages of Rock Star. But it would make me very happy if you included the photo in this blog post.
Favorites
Q 4. What is your favorite spread?
SNW: One of my favorite illustrations created by Nancy Carpenter is her two-page spread depicting Ursula examining a lunar rock from one of the Apollo moon missions. Ursula’s in her lab coat and gloves cradling this extra-terrestrial specimen, knowing she’s holding the secrets of the solar system. But can she unlock them? The anticipation—and pressure—is palpable.
Framed by the rim of the cratered moon with astronaut Neil Armstrong gathering lunar samples on one page, the reflecting spread is of a fiery, oozing moon, showing that Ursula did unlock some of those secrets. Discovering in the moon’s minerals that the lunar surface was once a bubbling ocean of melted rock, this changed planetary science forever.
Trailblazing Challenges
Q 5. Was creating this book—or your award-winning journalist/ kidlit path—anything remotely like the highs and lows Ursula Marvin faced throughout her career?
SNW: Despite the research challenges, creating Rock Star was a joy. And I did see similar experiences in my career as a trailblazer in sports broadcasting and Ursula’s career as a trailblazing geologist in space science. As the only woman in the room for most of my sports journalism career, I pushed back against gender discrimination and bullying meant to stop me from doing my job. I found allies in athletes, who would vouch for me when security guards refused to recognize my media credentials and tried blocking me from conducting interviews.
SNW: When Ursula’s professor blocked her from majoring in geology—he’d insisted that Ursula learn how to cook, instead—she pushed back by switching to a different university. As the first woman to search for meteorites in Antarctica—the stakes grew higher. If Ursula hadn’t found meteorites—and especially rare finds—there might not have been another woman scientist explorer on future meteorite expeditions.
And Ursula made sure that her findings were chronicled, recognized, and not appropriated by sending them to publications herself. Still, at the end of her seismic career, Ursula continued to be unknown. Like me, she’d need allies to gain recognition. They came in the form of the young lab assistants she’d mentored over several decades, many of them now accomplished scientists. They advocated to have Ursula’s obituary printed in the New York Times.
If they hadn’t succeeded, thousands of people—including me—would never have learned about Ursula Marvin.
Surprises
Q 6. What was one of the surprises or discoveries you made while working on Rock Star …?
SNW: Even though both Ursula and I faced sexism in our professions, I didn’t expect Ursula to experience self-doubt like I did.
Reading about this in her Antarctica ice journals made me want to write about Ursula even more, because it’s something I could relate to and felt young readers probably would, too. I wanted to learn how Ursula reacted to her self-doubt. How did she acknowledge it? How did she prevent it from sidelining her life?
In the year of Ursula’s second Antarctica expedition she’d turned sixty years old and faced ageism. And this seeped into her own psyche. Can I really climb to the top of that nunatak? Ursula soothed her insecurity by journaling about her fears, and also chronicling her strengths, leaning into her accomplishments as a scientist.
No one knew minerals and meteorites better than Ursula. But she also mined her imagination away from science. While riding her snowmobile in Antarctica, which she named Blue Ice, Ursula pretended to be a professional racer, riding with style and spirit.
Illustrations
Q 7. What surprises did illustrator Nancy Carpenter bring to the project?
SNW: There is a lot of snow and ice in Rock Star, and Nancy manages to make these scenes nuanced and unique—from the puff of Ursula’s breath in her yellow tent in Antarctica to the swirling, icy splashes of diving penguins, and the meaty snowflakes forming snow squalls that often kept Ursula and her teammates from finding meteorites.
SNW: And then there’s the way Nancy imbued Ursula’s feeling of pure joy in discovery and exploration—from that double spread of Ursula examining an Apollo mission lunar rock to Ursula riding her snowmobile, Blue Ice, in Antarctica toward a meteorite.
It’s no coincidence that Nancy chose to create two-page spreads whenever Ursula faced obstacles. These glorious illustrations signal Ursula’s triumphant actions over adversity—including gender discrimination.
What’s next?
Q 8. What’s next for you? Can you share any current projects in the works?
SNW: I have a few upcoming nonfiction picture books that also tap into my heritage and own trailblazing history:
Marie’s Magic Eggs publishes in the spring of 2026 with Calkins Creek and honors my Ukrainian roots and the Ukrainian art of pysanky (Ukrainian Easter Eggs). It’s the first picture book biography on Ukrainian immigrant and pysanky entrepreneur, Marie Procai. It’s gorgeously illustrated by Evan Turk.
And I’m excited to be collaborating with Nancy Carpenter again! Our next picture book is about a barrier-breaking woman sports journalist and how her breakthroughs led me to become a trailblazing sports broadcaster.
Fantastic! Thanks so much to Sandra Neil Wallace for joining us on the blog today.
And Happy (almost) Book Birthday to
Rock Star: How Ursula Marvin Mapped Moon Rocks and Meteorites
To learn more about Sandra Neil Wallace, check out these links:
Website: SandraNeilWallace.com
Next up on the blog:
We chat with Sarah Scheerger about her newest book, DUDE. BE NICE.
illus. Alex MacNaughton / Penguin Random House
Happy FALLing into BOOKS!
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