Annette LeBlanc Cate is the award-winning author-illustrator of The Magic Rabbit, A Dragon Used to Live Here, and Look Up! Bird-Watching in Your Own Backyard. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two sons.
In elementary school, I was famous for being the girl who would draw horses for all the other girls. While this didn’t exactly help my popularity level in high school, it did actually help me a lot in becoming an illustrator, because you have to draw stuff for people all the time. Drawing stuff for people is great. Even better is when you get to draw stuff for yourself, exactly how you want it. That’s what happens when you write your own stories and draw pictures to go with them, when you create your own world in a book. That’s the most wonderful fun of all, and I’m so delighted I get to do that for Candlewick!
Three Things You Might Not Know About Me:
1. I have also illustrated for magazines like Cobblestone and Cricket and Spider. And I am in Appleseeds magazine every month.
2. I was the art director for an animated show called Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist in the ‘90s... I really liked it, but I had to be the boss of a lot of artists (including my little sister!) and I think I am not necessarily the kind of person who should be the boss of artists. I like just being the boss of myself now.
3. Even though I wrote a book about birds and I love to watch them, I don’t feed them because once I accidentally lured a bear right up to my back door! (Bears love birdseed.) I still live in Massachusetts, now in a very small town with lots of birds and all sorts of critters (including bears), with my husband, Bob, and my two sons, Dave and James.
