Patricia Polacco

American writer and illustrator (born 1944)

Patricia Barber Polacco (born July 11, 1944) is an American author and illustrator. Throughout her school years, Polacco struggled with reading but found relief by expressing herself through art. Polacco endured teasing and hid her disability until a school teacher recognized that she could not read and began to help her. Her book Thank You, Mr. Falker is Polacco's retelling of this encounter and its outcome. She also wrote such books as Mr. Lincoln's Way and The Lemonade Club.

She was born Patricia Barber on July 11, 1944 in Lansing, Michigan, the daughter of a teacher and a salesman turned talk show host. She lived in Williamston, Michigan until the age of three, when her parents divorced and she moved with her mother and brother to her maternal grandmother's farm in Union City, Michigan. Many of Polacco's stories are influenced by this farm and the Russian folklore she her from her grandmother (referred to as "Babushka" in her books), who died in 1949 when Polacco was five years old. The family did not have a television and Polacco said on NPR, "our evenings were spent listening to glorious tales being told by the grandparents." The book Pink and Say comes from the life of a great great grandfather on her father's side, Sheldon Russell Curtis, who fought in the American Civil War and developed a moving friendship with a Black soldier named Pinkus Aylee. where she became friends with Frank Oz. At institutions in the United States and Australia, she earned a Master's and PhD in Art History.

Vandergrift, Kay E. "Peacocks, Dreams, Quilts, and Honey: Patricia Polacco, A Woman's Voice of Remembrance," In Ways of Knowing: Literature and the Intellectual Life of Children. Ed. By Kay E. Vandergrift. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996, pp. 259–288. Vandergrift, Kay E. "Patricia Polacco," in Twentieth Century Children's Writers. ed. by Laura Berger. 4th ed. Detroit: St. James, 1995. 759–760. Profile, childrenslit. com; accessed on July 8, 2015. Interview, TimeforKids. com; accessed on July 8, 2015.