J. C. Phillipps

Author/Illustrator J. C. Phillipps grew up in Perrysburg, Ohio where she spent most Saturdays taking classes at the Toledo Museum of Art. After graduating as Valedictorian of Mason Senior High School, she went to study art and theater at Hope College in Holland, MI. 

Ms. Phillipps lived in New York and Chicago for brief amounts of time before settling down in Boston, where she earned her MA at Emerson College and got married.

For two and a half years, she taught the Kindergarten – 1st Grade group at an after-school program which exposed her to a great amount of children's books. That's when she first started getting serious about a career in writing and illustrating.

Ms. Phillipps moved to Connecticut, had a son, acquired a cat, and joined the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI.) Her first book was, Wink: The Ninja Who Wanted to Be Noticed.

Learn More about Julie on her website!

Her books include: Wink: The Ninja Who Wanted to Be Noticed, Wink: The Ninja Who Wanted to Nap, and Monkey Ono.  The Simples Love a Picnic is coming out April 2014.

Bob Barboza

Bob Barboza is an educator, journalist, composer and director of Kids Talk Radio Science. He is the project director of the Super School University musical STEAM Plus program called "Occupy Mars and the Planets."  His educational programs include Backpack Journalism, Backpack Science and Backpack Robotics.  Bob conducts workshops with Kids Talk Radio and the Traveling Space Museum.

www.KidsTalkRadioLA.com

Anne Belov

Anne Belov has had a lifelong love affair with art, as a painter and now as a cartoonist and writer. Originally from points east, she now makes her home on Whidbey Island. She is the author and illustrator of The Panda Chronicles books 1 & 2, and the soon to be released Book 3: Nobody Expects the Panda Kindergarten, and working on a wordless picture book, Pandamorphosis. Her main regret in life is that there is no MacArthur Genius grant awarded in the field of Panda Satire.

Learn more about Anne on her website.

Steve Gray and Jen Ward

Jennifer Ward is the author of numerous acclaimed books for children, including the award-winning There Was a Coyote Who Swallowed a Flea, and, There Was an Old Monkey Who Swallowed a Frog, recipient of the IRA/CBC Children's Choice Award, and a #1 ebook best-seller. Learn more about Jennifer on her website

Steve Gray's book Farmer McPeepers and His Missing Milk Cows is an “Arkansas Diamond Honor Book” and was chosen by the California Teachers Association to promote “Read Across America”. There Was a Coyote Who Swallowed a Flea written by Jennifer Ward was a “New Mexico Book Award” nominee, a “Wyoming Reads” winner and a 2009 “Grand Canyon Reader Award” winner. You can see samples of his work at stevegrayillustration.com.

Holly Goldberg Sloan

Holly Goldberg Sloan is the author of Counting by 7s  and I'll Be There. Holly laos has written eight successful family feature films, three for the Walt Disney Company, including the baseball classic Angels in the Outfield, and the soccer movie, The Big Green, which she also directed (filmed in Austin, Texas). She also wrote the Universal Pictures comedy Made in America starring Whoopi Goldberg, Ted Danson and Will Smith, and the late Steve Irwin’s feature film for MGM: Collision Course: The Crocodile Hunter Movie.

Learn more about Holly on her website.

AJ Smith

AJ Smith is an author/illustrator specializing in silly stories and funny drawings for kids (and immature adults). He lives in Newburyport, MA with his beautiful girls, Karen, Mirabelle and Chloé. His first trade picture book, Even Monsters comes out in Spring 2014. Before becoming a published author/illustrator, AJ was a free-lance animator/designer for various companies including FableVision.

Learn more about AJ on his website.

Lois Lowry

Lois Lowry has won the Newbery Medal two times for her books Number the Stars (1989) and The Giver (1993). Her latest book, Son, completes "The Quartet" with The Giver, Gathering Blue, Messenger.

Learn more about Lois on her website

Katherine Applegate

Katherine Applegate won the 2013 Newbery Medal for The One and Only Ivan. Katherine's dot is the real Ivan's fingerprint, borrowed from John Schumacher's copy of THE ONE AND ONLY IVAN, made shortly before Ivan passed away.

Katherine's many books include the Roscoe Riley Rules chapter book series, the picture book The Buffalo Storm, and the award-winning novel Home of the Brave. With her husband, Michael Grant, she wrote the hugely popular series Animorphs, which has sold more than 35 million copies worldwide.

Katherine was inspired to write The One and Only Ivan after reading about the true story of a captive gorilla known as Ivan, the Shopping Mall Gorilla. The real Ivan lived alone in a tiny cage for twenty-seven years at a shopping mall before being moved to Zoo Atlanta after a public outcry.

Katherine lives in California with her husband and two children. Source

Read more about The One and Only Ivan and Katherine on this website.

Watch the book trailer for The One and Only Ivan


Watch Katherine at the 2013 Newbery- Caldecott-Wilder Banquet

Peter H. Reynolds 2013

On the 'book birthday' of The Dot, Peter H. Reynolds shares one of the rough sketches for the cover of The Dot that he sent to Candlewick Press. Here are more pieces to celebrate International Dot Day 2013!

In honor of the Tenth Anniversary, Candlewick Press has released The Dot:Make Your Mark Kit.

Learn more about International Dot Day

Learn more about Peter H. Reynolds

Peter's next book is The Smallest Gift of Christmas

Robert Forbes

Robert Forbes is children's author, with three books of poetry published so far: Beastly Feasts!, Let's Have a Bite!, and this year, Beast Friends Forever!, all illustrated by the  late great Ronald Searle. I love reading to kids, and especially telling them that they have wonderful imaginations, as good as anybody's.

Robert writes, "A 7th grade report card said that I spent "a lot of time looking out the window." I still do. And I find dots in the darnedest places.

I am on Twitter and Facebook under robertlforbes, or visit my site, which is undergoing a redo, at robertlforbes.com

BEAST FRIENDS FOREVER! from Kinetic Media NYC on Vimeo.

Lisa Jahn-Clough

Lisa Jahn-Clough has published over a dozen picture books and three young adult novels. Her work has won awards from Child Magazine,Parent’s Choice, Bank Street, Raising Readers, and Entertainment Weekly. Her latest novel is Nothing But Blue. She is working on the text for a series of early-reader graphic comic books. ​

Learn more about Lisa on her website.

Watch the book trailer for Nothing But Blue

Mike Litwin

Mike Litwin is an award-winning illustrator who combines a variety of media to create scenes that serve the imagination and education of children. In other words, he's a big kid who gets paid to make pictures all day. It pretty much rocks. He is best known for his work on the New York Times best-selling picture books My Name is Not Isabella, My Name is Not Alexander, and Isabella: Girl on the Go. Illustrating and telling stories for children is Mike's passion, his privelage, his entertainment, and his dream. His fun and original approach is sure to captivate kids of all ages--from the ones who have yet to grow up to the ones who refuse to. He lives in Greenville, North Carolina with his wife and their four children.

Learn more about Mike on his website

Find him on Facebook

Follow him on Twitter 

Louann Brown

Louann Brown is the co-author of How to Create Spectacular Halloween Costumes, Capstone 2011.
She asked her Facebook friends to select her dot, you can see the other choices are posted on my blog pagewww.louannmattesbrown@blogspot.com
Learn more about Louann on her website. www.louannmattesbrown.com

Julie Falatko

Julie Falatko's first picture book, Snappsy the Alligator (Did Not Ask to Be in This Book) will be published by Viking in the summer of 2015. She's on Twitter as @JulieFalatko, blogs at http://worldofjulie.com, and is the picture book reviewer for the Brain Burps About Books podcast.

Julie says about her dot:

"When I was in high school and college, I doodled a lot in the margins of my notes. I was daydreaming. Half listening to the teacher, half listening to whatever was in my head. Daydreaming is such an essential part of being a writer, isn't it? It's like emptying out your pockets. So many strange and unrelated objects. Can I make them fit together? And what's THAT doing in there? My dot is my daydream -- I doodled whatever came to mind.

David Kalvitis 2013

This is David Kalvitis' second year participating! David Kalvitis, a lifelong puzzle and game fan, has a Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University and operated a graphic design business in Upstate NY for 13 years. In 2000 he opened Monkeying Around Publishing , with a goal to provide fun and challenging dot-to-dot puzzles that entertain both young and old alike. So far he has self-published sixteen books and has sold over a half of a million books worldwide. He also has weekly dot-to-dot puzzles published in various newspapers in the USA, Belarus, Italy, Slovakia and the United Kingdom.

Learn more on his website.

Jennifer Fosberry

Jennifer Fosberry is a science geek turned children' book writer. After working in the high tech industry in Silicon Valley and running away to Costa Rica for a few years, she returned to the San Francisco Bay area to read, write, and try to get out of housework.

Learn more about Jennifer on her website

Commander Chris Hadfield

Commander Chris Hadfield was the Commander of the International Space Station for expedition 35. He was the first Canadian to Command an ISS expedition, and spent nearly six months aboard the ISS. While traveling in low-earth orbit, he achieved a remarkable level of international popularity through social media. Commander Hadfield was tweeting, and streaming, and sharing as much as he could of his experience with the world below. His “Space Oddity” video has been viewed more than 100,000,000 times since its posting back in May on various social media feeds.

Learn how Commander Hadfield took "The Dot" into space! 

Commander Hadfield has a book coming out in October.

Mrs. P. (Kathy Kinney)

MrsP.com endeavors to expose young people to great books and stories through a celebrity storyteller and to spark their imaginations and creativity with on-line games and the annual Be-a-Famous Writer contest. Mrs. P stars T.V. actress, Kathy Kinney, who before Mrs. P was best known as Mimi on “The Drew Carey Show.”  www.MrsP.com is always free, contains no ads and new video stories are added to the magic library monthly. The website also shows the words to help early readers and ESL students and has free coloring sheets and activity guides to download.  It won the distinction of the American Library Associations Great Site for Kids.

Mrs. P does many visits to schools across the country each year using technology. 

Visit Mrs. P at http://www.MrsP.com