Kari-Lynn Winters is an award-winning picture book author, playwright, and scholar who enjoys being in the classroom in any of these capacities. She holds a position at Brock University as a full professor of drama-in-education, dance-in-education, and literacy. Her graduate work, which was completed at the University of British Columbia, focused on combining the arts with reading and writing.

When Kari-Lynn began to write children’s picture book manuscripts and submit them to publishers about 22 years ago, people often shook their heads, advising her to write novels instead.

“It is so difficult to get picture books published in these times,” they said.

But Kari-Lynn persisted, continuing to collect, read, research, and write picture books. Her persistence paid off. Today, 31 books (picturebooks, poetry, non-fiction) that Kari-Lynn wrote have been accepted for publication. In addition, she has had academic chapters and articles about multimodality and student literacy published by Heinemann and in The Reading Teacher.

Kari-Lynn says the best thing about writing for children is that she can share silly ideas in funny and interactive ways and that she can talk to children about their own experiences as young authors.