GENRE: STEM/STEAM, NF, Biography
WORDS: 1045
Query:
Dear PBParty Agents and Editors,
When Cecelia Bavolek was born in 1934, surgery to repair the hole in her heart was considered impossible. As she grew, the hole grew larger, and her heart, weaker. Cecelia knew she needed help. What she didn’t know that years before she was born, two other children were growing up—two curious, creative children who would eventually invent the machine that made modern heart surgery possible for Cecelia and millions more, including the 1.3 million children born each year with congenital heart defects like the one that made Cecelia sick.
A Work of Heart: How Maly and Jack Gibbon Built a Beating, Breathing, Life-Saving Machine invites readers ages 6-10 to consider STEAM through the intersecting lives of three children. This 1,045-word narrative nonfiction story centers on Maly and Jack Gibbon, the bold scientists who met in a Boston laboratory and spent 23 years inventing a machine that could do the work of the human heart and lungs outside of the body, and Cecelia, the first patient to survive surgical repair of her heart while connected to the heart and lung machine which occurred in Philadelphia on May 6, 1953.
A Work of Heart combines the simple science in Rajani LaRocca’s Your One and Only Heart with the contemporary storytelling about under-recognized medical heroes in Danna Zeiger’s Rewriting the Rules: How Dr. Kathleen Friel Created New Possibilities for Brain Research and Disability and Lisa Katzenberger’s It Belongs to the World: Frederick Banting and the Invention of Insulin.
My research for this story included an interview with Maly and Jack’s only living child, Alice, age 89, and visits to the historical medical library at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the National Archives of Medicine, and Maly’s family home, where I was able to review her diaries, photo albums and correspondence.
I’m a writer for adults and children with work published in The New York Times, CNN and Huffington Post. My first book, A Sukkah for Bella, was published with Lovevery Books in 2025, and a second title, Sharing the Light, releases this fall. I serve on the selection committee for the Malka Penn Award for Human Rights in Children’s Literature at the University of Connecticut and my local library foundation board. I’m also a member of SCBWI and 12×12.
Thank you for considering my work.
Excerpt:
Billions of heartbeats ago,
Cecelia was born with a hole in her heart,
a problem doctors didn’t know how to fix.
Ceely, as everyone called her, hardly felt sick as a child.
She played sports and hoped to become a teacher.
But as she grew, her heart grew weaker.
Soon she could hardly climb the stairs at school.
Every breath felt tight.
Every heartbeat hurt.
Cecelia knew she needed help.
What inspired you to write this story & what do you have in common with it:
When my mother underwent surgery to repair damage in her heart caused by childhood illness, I sat anxiously in the waiting room, wondering who invented this machine that was beating for my mother’s heart and breathing for her lungs. I loved learning about Maly and Jack, partners in the lab and in life, who had the audacity to envision and then accomplish what was long considered impossible: a machine that would make heart surgery possible. By sharing how their lives ultimately intersected with Cecelia’s, the brave woman who went first, I hope to inspire a new generation of curious, creative scientists.
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