Laurel Snyder is the author of eight novels for children, “Orphan Island,” “My Jasper June,” “The Witch of Woodland,” “Bigger than a Bread Box,” “Penny Dreadful,” “Any Which Wall,” “Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains OR The Search for a Suitable Princess,” and “Seven Stories Up.” She has also written many picture books, including “Charlie and Mouse (with Emilly Hughes),” “Endlessly Every After (with Dan Santat),” “The Forever Garden (with Samantha Cotterill),” “Swan, the Life and Dance of Anna Pavlova (with Julie Morstad),” “Inside the Slidy Diner (with Jaime Zollars), and “Baxter, the Pig Who Wanted to Be Kosher (with David Goldin).”
In addition to her books for children, Laurel has written two books of poems, “Daphne & Jim: a choose-your-own-adventure biography in verse” (Burnside Review Press, 2005) and “The Myth of the Simple Machines” (No Tell Books, 2007). She also edited an anthology of nonfiction, “Half/Life: Jew-ish tales from Interfaith Homes” (Soft Skull Press, 2006) A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Michener-Engle Fellow, Laurel has published work in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the Utne Reader, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Revealer, Salon, The Iowa Review, American Letters and Commentary, and elsewhere. She was an occasional commentator for NPR’s All Things Considered, and she currently teaches in the MFAC program at Hamline University, and also in the creative writing department at Emory University.
A Baltimore native, Laurel lives in Atlanta (in beautiful Ormewood Park), with her family. Which is really the best part.