People-Nature-Art with Children's Author Will Hillenbrand

Description

Will Hillenbrand is an award-winning writer and illustrator of children's literature who has worked on more than seventy books for young people. His latest is Light as a Feather: Fifteen phenomenal North American Birds. Join us for this special People-Nature-Art program May 5; it will be an online-only event. Hillenbrand has lived almost all his life in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he grew up surrounded by stories; he heard many of them hanging out in his father’s barbershop. “As a kid, I often walked to the shop in the summer and delivered my Dad’s hot lunch. Then, I would take a break and listen to the conversations. Many customers told “big fish” stories laced with humor and exaggeration. I enjoyed drawing those stories at the kitchen table when I returned home,” he says. The youngest of four boys with diverse personalities and talents, Hillenbrand says his mother told him he was “born with a pencil in his hand.” While he drew mostly on paper at the kitchen table, he also used crayons on the stairwell walls not always, he says, to his mother’s delight. He attended the Art Academy of Cincinnati, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in graphic design and worked as an artist in commercial advertising. But then he took a class in picture book art at Ohio State University, and Will Hillenbrand the graphic designer and Will Hillenbrand the storyteller merged. He pursued a career in children’s book illustration, with his first book art published in a 1990 juvenile novel by Elvira Woodruff called Awfully Short for the Fourth Grade. Hillenbrand has developed a distinct colorful illustrative style, working in acrylics, artist crayons, colored pencils, egg temperas, gouache, inks, oils and oil pastels, and pens to bring his characters to life on the page. He has won many awards, including the 1990 Gold Medal, Society of Illustrators; a Notable Book citation from the American Library Association for Traveling to Tondo: A Tale of the Nkundo of Zaire; the Children’s Choice citation from the International Reading Association for Sam Sunday and the Mystery at the Ocean Beach Hotel and The House That Drac Built; 1995 Best Books designation from the School Library Journal; 1995 Irma S. and James H. Black Award for Excellence in Children’s Literature; and the 1997 North Carolina Children’s Book Award for Wicked Jack; 1997 Horn Book Fanfare List for Coyote and the Fire Stick: A Northwest Coast Indian Legend; 2000 Ohioana Citation for Art; 2002 Please Touch Book Award for Kiss the Cow; 2002 Parenting magazine, Best Books of the Year for Fiddle-I-Fee. He was the Illustrator and Author in Residence at Kent State University (2017-19) and the Art Academy of Cincinnati (2019-20).