Kathi Appelt

Kathi Appelt (born July 6, 1954)^[1] is an American author of more than forty books for children and young adults.^[2] She won the annual PEN USA award for Children's Literature recognizing The Underneath (2008).^[3]

Kathi Appelt
Appelt at the 2017 Texas Book Festival
Born	(1954-07-06) July 6, 1954 (age 70) Fayetteville, North Carolina, U.S.
Occupation	Writer, writing teacher
Alma mater	Texas A&M University
Period	1990s–present
Genre	Children's literature, picture books, non-fiction
Website
kathiappelt.com

Biography

Kathi Appelt was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina,^[1] and grew up in Houston, Texas. She graduated from Texas A&M University and lives in College Station, Texas.^[4]

Appelt is the author of more than 30 books. She writes novels, picture books, poetry, and nonfiction for children and young adults.^[5] Her books have been translated into several languages: Spanish, Chinese, French, and Swedish.^[6] She is emerita faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults program.^[7]

Her first novel was The Underneath, illustrated by David Small and published by Simon & Schuster in 2008. It features a cat and dog who live mainly beneath an old house in the Louisiana–Texas bayou. For that work she received the annual Children's Literature award from PEN Center USA^[3] and she was also a runner-up for the National Book Award (National Book Award for Young People's Literature finalist)^[8] and the American Library Association Newbery Medal (Newbery Honor Book).^[9]

Her papers are held in the de Grummond Children's Literature Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi (unprocessed manuscripts collection, 1985–2005).^[10]

Selected works

• Someone’s Come to Our House, illustrated by Nancy Carpenter (Eerdmans, 1999)^[11]
• The Alley Cat's Meow, illustrated by Jon Goodell (Harcourt, 2002)
• Poems from Homeroom: A Writer's Place to Start (Henry Holt and Co., 2002)
• The Underneath, illustrated by David Small (Simon & Schuster, 2008)
• Brand-New Baby Blues, illustrated by Kelly Murphy (HarperCollins, 2009)
• Keeper, illus. August Hall (Atheneum Books, 2010)
• The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2013)
• Maybe a Fox, illus. Alison McGee (Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books, 2016)
• Down Cut Shin Creek: The Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky, co-authored by Jeanne Cannella Schmitzer (HarperCollins, 2001; Purple House Press 2019)
• Max Attacks, illus. Penelope Dullaghan (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2019)
• Angel Thieves (Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books, 2019)