PORTSMOUTH — After visiting 90-year-old Rosalys Haskell Hall (who goes by "Posie") several times at her home in Aquidneck Place, Portsmouth resident and parent of a student at St. Philomena School Joanne Moniz decided to bring a few St. Phil's students along for a visit with Ms. Hall.

Ms. Hall is the author of 17 published children's novels and has many unpublished manuscripts sitting in boxes in her home. Rather than see those unpublished stories go to waste, Ms. Moniz decided to read some of the stories aloud to the St. Phil's students. While they listened to one of the stories, "A Bone for Jonesy," Ms. Moniz asked the children to illustrate it.

"The idea of asking children to illustrate what they see in their imagination from what they have read is just another way of getting children excited about reading," Ms. Moniz said.

"They did a beautiful job and we now have a lovely color copy of it," she said.

The author shares a laugh with students. PHOTO BY RICHARD W. DIONNE JR.

After sixth-grade students Kim Martel, Alec Moniz and Stefan Nassaney and eighth-grade student Tarin Nassaney created their illustrations, Ms. Moniz had a volunteer assemble the book and illustrations on the computer. She hoped to read the book aloud to a fourth-grade class at St. Philomena's in celebration of Ms. Hall's 90th birthday.

"Someone found out that all the fourth graders were going to listen to the story and from the time that the thought entered my head, five minutes later someone had donated the money to put all the books together," Ms. Moniz said.

That someone was Maris Humphreys, who visits Ms. Hall at Aquidneck Place every week. The books were printed and assembled by high-school students Christian Moniz and Robert Cabral and were given out to the fourth-grade students who crowded the library in the basement of St. Phil's to listen to the story read aloud to them by Ms. Moniz on Friday morning, April 16.

"We forget in Newport sometimes the wealth of talent we have right here," Lee Silvestre, mother of illustrators Tarin and Stefan Nassaney, said. "Kids today don't have a way to connect to more traditional children's writers. This was a great way to pull a sense of community into something relative to a literature assignment."

In addition to the wealth of unpublished stories in her home, Ms. Hall is also a direct descendent of Roger Williams and a great-granddaughter of Julia Ward Howe, author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, abolitionist and women's suffrage advocate.

Ms. Hall was born in New York City and lived there until the 1950s when she moved to Newport. A great animal lover (many of her children's books featured animals, including "A Bone for Jonesy"), Ms. Hall was known throughout Newport as a dog-walker.

"A lot of people remember seeing you walking in Newport," Ms. Moniz said to Ms. Hall as the fourth-graders listened. "The dogs were all different sizes with different lengths of the leash. You couldn't tell if she was walking the dogs or the dogs were walking her."

Ms. Hall spoke fondly of her walks with her dogs, and said one of her cats used to follow along on the walks, too. She recalls being featured on television once, as her daily walk passed in front of the Newport Courthouse where television cameras focused on her during their spare time while they waited for the end of an important trial.

Pleased to see a new generation enjoying her stories, Ms. Hall said, "I'm very grateful to them. Children love animals, and I love them, of course."

By Jean Ignatuk

jignatuk@eastbaynewspapers.com