Miriam Nerlove

I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio and received my master’s degree in printmaking from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. For a time I worked in the Photograph and Slide Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, while doing editorial illustration work for newspapers such as Barron’s and the Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly. Later I worked on greeting cards for Recycled Paper Greetings in Chicago. While working solely in pen and ink for the editorial work, I began to get interested in watercolor as I approached writing and illustrating for children. My first book, I Made a Mistake, was published by Atheneum, and further books include I Meant to Clean my Room Today, Just One Tooth and Flowers on the Wall, a story I was inspired to write from a photograph taken by Roman Vishniac on the eve of the Holocaust, which was published by Simon and Schuster/Margaret McElderry, in 1996. Other books I’ve written and illustrated include a series of holiday books for Albert Whitman and Company. My most recent books that I've illustrated have been for Creative Editions and are Dot, Stripe, Squiggle and Spot, Spike, Spiral, both written by Sarah Grace Tuttle, I Am Polar Bear and I Am Elephant, written by J. Patrick Lewis, and A Home Like This, written by Laura Purdie Salas.

I continue to experiment with watercolor and painting art for art’s sake, with my latest focus on animals and their beautiful and varying attributes.