Kelly Bennett loves fish. "Fish are fun and funny," she says. "Just watching them makes me laugh." When she's not writing, Kelly creates tile mosaics and digs in her garden. She has two grown children, Max and Lexi, and lives in Texas with her husband, Curtis, and their goldfish—whom she would never trade.
Noah Z. Jones loves drawing fish of all shapes and sizes, but especially smallish orange ones named Norman. This is his first children's book. He lives in coastal Maine with his wife, Diane, and their tuna-lovin' cat, Mabel.
My journey to become a children’s book author began behind the wheel of a 1979 Cadillac Coupe de Ville with a sagging ceiling liner and an enormous Band-aid glued over a dent on the rear driver’s side. That car was big, green, and ugly. My four-year-old son, Max, sat on his kiddie booster in the back seat; my two-year-old daughter, Alexis, rode beside me in the front. We drove that Caddie from Oklahoma to California and back again with no radio and no air conditioning. All we had were songs, stories, and one another. On that long, dusty trip I learned I could make up one whopper of a story. I also decided that I wanted to keep making up stories, and I wanted those stories to become books. Eventually I graduated from Vermont College’s MFA program in writing for children and young adults.
In the more than twenty years since that fateful car ride, my stories have appeared in newspapers, magazines, and more than twelve books for children—both nonfiction and fiction. My children, Max and Lexi, still enjoy hearing my stories.
I’m a list maker—always have been. As soon as I learned to write, I started making lists: birthday lists, Christmas lists, to-do lists, things to do on vacation, stuff to remember to tell my best friend, why I hate fill-in-the-blank, all the reasons I love fill-in-the-blank. Right now I have a list of titles called Books I’m Going to Write One Day. Many of my stories start as lists. Not Norman, A Goldfish Story began as a list of all the things a good pet should be. That turned into a list of reasons why a goldfish is a good pet. Dad and Pop, about a girl who has two fathers, is what many call a “list story.” “f I am writing a story and get stuck, or can’t figure out what happens next, I get busy making lists.
And so it seems fitting to end with a list. Here are 10 Truths and A Lie: Things You Don’t Know About Me:
1. My favorite snack is chocolate in one hand, potato chips in the other.
2. I grew up in California, near the beach.
3. I have visited all fifty of the United States, as well as fifteen countries and four continents—so far!
4. I wear a retainer to bed every night.
5. I have ridden elephants, camels, and a dolphin.
6. I have eaten ants, crickets, snakes, alligator, frogs, and sago palm larvae.
7. Norman the goldfish is named after my cat.
8. Kelly is not really my name.
9. I live part time in Texas and the rest of the time in Jakarta, Indonesia, with my husband, Curtis.
10. I once raced a SCCA Sports Renault.
11. I never travel anywhere without my pillow.
Can you guess which one is the lie?
Noah Z. Jones is an author/illustrator/animator who draws all sorts of wacky oddities out of his home in Camden, Maine. After taking part in a monster-drawing contest in the fifth grade (placing fourth out of five), he realized that he wanted to create art for a living.
As a kid, Noah Z. Jones’s love for drawing was fueled by dinosaurs, monster movies, and the Wacky Packages line of trading cards. He would spend hours poring over books by Maurice Sendak, Richard Scarry, and Mercer Mayer.
His unique art and designs have added to numerous award-winning projects from clients such as Nickelodeon, PBS, and Disney. His crazy web-developed characters have attracted worldwide recognition and can often be spotted popping up on T-shirts around the globe.
Noah Z. Jones’s ability to change styles both digitally and with traditional pencil drawings demonstrates an unusual stylistic versatility. His books with Candlewick Press, Not Norman, The Monster in the Backpack, Those Shoes, and the Bed and Biscuit series— each with a different author — show his ability to approach every story with a fresh eye.
In addition to his work on children’s books, Noah Z. Jones divides his time between creative collaborations with commercial clients and developing his own odd collection of characters, ideas, and all-around lunacy.
