Bio

Anne Sibley O’Brien is a children’s book creator who has illustrated thirty picture books, including Jamaica’s Find and six other Jamaica books by Juanita Havill (Houghton Mifflin) and Jouanah: A Hmong Cinderella (Shen’s Books) by Jewell Reinhart Coburn and Tzexa Lee. She has collaborated with Margy Burns Knight on five books: Talking Walls; Who Belongs Here? An American Story; Welcoming Babies and Talking Walls: The Stories Continue (all Tilbury House, Publishers); and Africa Is Not A Country (Millbrook Press). In 1997 they received the National Education Association Author-Illustrator Human & Civil Rights Award for their body of work.

O’Brien has also illustrated a number of her own books, including two retellings of Korean tales, The Princess and the Beggar (Scholastic), and The Legend of Hong Kil Dong: The Robin Hood of Korea (Charlesbridge), a picture book in graphic novel form, which was named a "Booklist Top Ten Graphic Novels for Youth" and won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and the Aesop Prize. With her grown son, Perry O'Brien, she co-wrote After Gandhi: One Hundred Years of Nonviolent Resistance (Charlesbridge), a non-fiction book for 10 years and up, which won the 2010 Maine Literary Book Award and was named one of the "Notable Books for A Global Society" by the International Reading Association.

Her most recent books are What Will You Be, Sara Mee? (Charlesbridge) by Kate Aver Avraham, and Moon Watchers: Shirin's Ramadan Miracle by Reza Jalali (Tilbury House). A Path of Stars (Charlesbridge), a Cambodian-American story which she wrote and illustrated under commission by the Maine Humanities Council, will be released in 2012.

O’Brien’s passion for multiracial, multicultural, and global subjects was kindled by her experience of being raised bilingual and bicultural in South Korea as the daughter of medical missionaries. She attended Mount Holyoke College where she majored in Studio Art, and spent her junior year abroad at Ewha Women’s University in Seoul, Korea. In addition to creating books, she has been involved for many years in diversity education and leadership training. She is also a performer, and has created a one-woman show entitled “White Lies: one woman’s quest for release from the enchantment of whiteness” (http://www.WhiteLies.ws). She writes the column, "The Illustrator's Perspective," for the Bulletin of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, and a blog, "Coloring Between the Lines." She lives with her husband on an island in Maine, and is the mother of two grown children.