My hobbies are bicycling, woodworking, and tending a big vegetable garden behind the house. I live in a seaside town in Massachusetts with my wife, my daughter, two cats and a hamster. I also get lots of work published in Cricket, Spider, Ladybug and Babybug magazines, and I enjoy visiting schools to work with students on writing and illustrating stories. My other three written-and-illustrated books to date are the New York Times bestseller, Bats at the Beach, Hamlet and the Enormous Chinese Dragon Kite, and Hamlet and the Magnificent Sandcastle. Since then, I've illustrated some twenty books, including my newest one, Bats at the Library, which I also wrote. In 1989, I illustrated my first book, Flatfoot Fox and the Case of the Missing Eye, with Houghton Mifflin Company in Boston. Suddenly I had a career as an editorial and political illustrator, working with a lot of magazines and newspapers. So after graduation from college in 1985, I moved to Boston to study drawing and painting at the Boston Museum School (also known as the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).Īt the Museum School, I started getting paintings in exhibitions and won a few prizes, and then was able to get political illustrations published in the Christian Science Monitor and the Boston Globe. I began to think about what I really wanted to do for a career, and what I really wanted was something that involved art. I went to Brown University after high school, where I studied Psychology and British and American Literature. I actually sold some, too-my first taste of self-employment. During high school, I also painted with oil paints and made stained glass windows. I had always liked to draw, though, and kept doing it just for fun.

I wished it could be my job! But I didn’t think I was good enough at either writing or drawing to even try. When I was in fifth grade, an author and illustrator visited my school, and I was amazed that one could have a job writing and drawing. At various times during my childhood, we had newts, gerbils and rabbits as pets. I spent a lot of time building dams and forts in the woods across the street with my best friend, inventing things, and writing and drawing with my older sister. I was born in 1963 in Princeton, New Jersey, which back then was a quiet college town, surrounded by old farmland slowly giving way to housing developments.

Bats at the library by brian lies