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Acclaimed author/illustrator Jeanette Winter has written and illustrated more that 60 books for children. Her first self-authored picture book, published in 1988 was Follow the Drinking Gourd, and it was at that time that she developed the folk-art based style of illustration for which she has become so renowned.

Many of Jeanette's books any based on true stories. She has created several picture book biographies of inspirational people past and present from around the world, including The Librarian of Basra: A True Story from Iraq; Wangari’s Trees of Peace: A True Story from Africa and, most recently, The Watcher: Jane Goodall's Life with the Chimps. She has illustrated two books written by her son, Jonah Winter: The Secret World of Hildegardand Diego, a biography of Diego Rivera and winner of a New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Book of the Year. Her books have garnered many awards and special mentions, including the 2010 Jane Addams Children's Book Award in the Books for Younger Children category for Nasreen's Secret School: A True Story from Afghanistan.

Jeanette's vibrant picture book Biblioburro: A True Story from Colombia, about Luis Soriano's donkey library bringing books to children in remote parts of Colombia, has been selected for inclusion in the 2011 Spirit of PaperTigers Book Set.

Jeanette lives with her husband artist Roger Winter in New York City and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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Quotations taken from our interview with Jeanette Winter:

I made these illustrations [for Biblioburro] quite spontaneously and instinctively. There was really no plan beforehand other than a very, very tiny, rough dummy. I mainly used the sky to indicate the time of day.

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[About Nasreen's Secret School] The doorways in the earlier illustrations communicated a sense of danger and imprisonment, I hope. I often like to frame my pictures because it seems to me that one can look at a framed picture and truly enter into another world, like looking into a mirror or out of a window. Illustrations that bleed, or use the white space of the page have another quality, which I also like, but it’s different.

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Each book is different. I often make no preliminary sketches at all, and my editor won’t quite know what to expect until I deliver the art. I like the spontaneity that this allows. Sometimes I will make a rough tiny dummy (2 ½” X 2 ½”, or slightly larger) with books where the illus. bleed to the edges. Sometimes I make all the illustrations before I even have a contract. The words will come first on some books, the pictures first on others. Sometimes, mainly for graphic reasons, I use speech bubbles to convey the narrative: a story has a different impact when speech bubbles are used, and they’re fun to make. After all these years, I don’t have a set pattern. It keeps work exciting. My finished art is same size, or often smaller. The art for Biblioburro was enlarged.

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I would like Biblioburro to be on the Biblioburro book cart, so those children in the countryside of Colombia will see how their story is important to people far away.

Posted September 2011

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