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Larry Brimner

Web site: www.brimner.com

Although his mother claimed he was born a writer, Larry Dane Brimner denies it. "Like everyone else, I was born a baby," he said, "and in my case that event took place in 1949 in St. Petersburg, Florida." By the time he was a year old, however, his father's naval job took the family to Alaska, and Brimner spent his early childhood exploring Kodiak Island. Brimner considers himself fortunate to have spent his earliest years where television was nonexistent and radio reception only sporadic. "Books filled our evening hours. My parents read to me, and not just children's books. They acquainted me with Twain and Hemingway and Steinbeck and Fitzgerald and were always patient with their explanations, of which I'm sure there must have been many. Then something magical happened: my mother taught me to read. By the time I was four, I could decipher very basic sentences, and it filled me with such enthusiasm for reading that my excitement was hard to contain. I wanted to read everything. Alas, even Hemingway's simple writing style contained more than the basic words I knew, so I contented myself with children's books in our family library, and some that I would make up myself. The writer inside me was born."

Larry Brimner talks with students at Lafayette Elementary School in Eureka during the 2003 Humboldt County Children's Author Festival.

After a lackluster elementary and high school education, Brimner thrived when he attended college in San Diego. He especially enjoyed the wider selection of books, and after flirting with a number of majors, graduated with a degree in literature. He considered writing at that point, but his father objected. "Real people don't become writers," the elder Brimner advised. "Real people get a job."

So began a twenty-year teaching career, including six years at the college level. But his closet desire to write never died. He enrolled in writing courses and joined the Society of Children's Book Writers, which offered lectures and consultations. Best of all, he recalls, was meeting "other people like myself -- people with a serious interest in writing for children."

In 1984 he sold his first children's book, BMX Freestyle, which was published in 1987. Readers responded by naming it an International Reading Association (IRA) Children's Choice book for 1988. Subsequent books have also proven popular with their target audience, garnering nominations for several young reader awards. Max and Felix was a nominee for the Kentucky Bluegrass Award; Elliot Fry's Good-bye, was a nominee for Maryland's Black-Eyed Susan Picture Book Award; and Merry Christmas, Old Armadillo was a nominee for Alabama's Children's Choice Award and named to the Kansas Reading Circle. Most recently, Snowboarding was named a Children's Choice book for 1998 by the IRA/CBC, while The Official M&M's Book of the Millenium was named a Children's Choice book for 2000. His latest project, about a skateboard-riding, fish-taco-eating cat called Cat on Wheels, was nominated for the 2002 Michigan Readers' Choice Award. The Littlest Wolf (HarperCollins, 2002), which was translated into Japanese, was named an IRA/CBC Children's Choice book. It also received the Oppenheim Gold Medal for Best Book 2002, won the San Diego Books Award (2002), was a 2004 Great Lakes' Great Books (Michigan) Honor Book, and was a 2005 nominee for the Arkansas Diamond Award. Brimner's most recent book, Subway: The Story of Tunnels, Tubes, and Tracks (Boyds Mills Press, 2004) was a Junior Library Guild selection.

Although he was not born a writer, as his mother once liked to claim, Brimner is happy to be one now. He works at his career full time, never forgetting that his traditional Southern-raised parents frowned on falsehoods, but encouraged embellishment. When he's not traveling to speak to school children about the writing process or to conferences to address teachers, he lives in Southern California and the Rocky Mountains.He is the author of more than eighty books for young people.

"When I see a book I have written on a shelf at a library or bookstore or in a child's hands, it feels so good it hurts."