Perkins, Lynne Rae
July 31, 1956 -
Place of Birth: Pittsburgh, PA
Place of Principle Residence: Cedar, MI
Biography:
Lynne Rae Perkins was born to Janet and Raymond Calvert in Pittsburgh, PA. She earned her B.F.A. in Drawing and Painting at Pennsylvania State University in 1978 and her M.F.A. in Printmaking at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1981. Upon graduating from the latter, Perkins moved to Boston where she worked as a graphic designer. There she met and married her husband, Bill, and moved to the northern woods of Michigan. The couple lived in a house constructed by Bill (a furniture maker) that had no electricity, telephone service, or running water, requiring woodstoves, a propane-powered refrigerator, and walking to a nearby park for buckets of water. Perkins got her foot in the publishing world when she attended the 1993 Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators Conference and got her illustrations looked at by the art director of GreenWillow Books. The director liked what she saw, and in 1995 Perkins’ first book was published, Home Lovely. Since then Perkins has written and illustrated many other books, including the Newberry Award-winning Criss Cross. She now lives in Cedar, MI in a house designed by herself and built by her husband, with her two children: Lucy and Frank.
Selected Works:
- Home Lovely (1995)
- Clouds for Dinner (1997)
- All Alone in the Universe (1999)
- The Broken Cat (2002)
Awards:
- Home Lovely Horn Book Honor Book
- Clouds: riverbank Review’s books of distinction
Critical Reception:
For Criss Cross:
“Writing in a wry, omniscient third-person narrative voice, Perkins deftly captures the tentativeness and incompleteness of adolescence. In 38 brief chapters, this poetic, postmodern novel experiments with a variety of styles: haiku, song lyrics, question-and-answer dialogue and split-screen scenarios. With seeming yet deliberate randomness, Perkins writes an orderly, innovative, and risk-taking book in which nothing happens and everything happens.”
- Newberry Award Committee Chair Barbara Barstow
For The Broken Cat:
“Perkins is a genius at capturing the odd details that reveal so much about individuals and families, and how they interact.”
- Riverbank Review
“Lynne Rae Perkins has the gift of surprising — and, once she’s caught you and often delighted you, of shifting your point of view, or showing you something new, or getting you to think about something you hadn’t thought about before, at least in quite that way.”
- Horn Book Magazine
Relevance of Place to Author’s Work:
Perkins draws her inspiration from living in the northern woods of Michigan. Her book, Clouds for Dinner, was based on her experience on her and her husband’s first and very rustic house.