Carter Boucher

Carter is a writer, visual artist and musician. He lives and works in South Carolina, USA. His writing ranges from children's books to non fiction, poetry, satire and fiction.

Carter works with ARTS ACCESS SOUTH CAROLINA (as a Master Teaching Artist), the South Carolina Arts Commission (as a juried roster artist) and freelances in writing, visual arts and music.

Recent works include a residency working with Autistic children, Sponsored by ARTS ACCESS South Carolina and the Aiken County Center for the Arts, in which several break through moments occurred. Two non verbal autistic children spoke. One sang a song and then talked about it and another non verbal child talked with Carter about how well he could scream.

Upcoming books include So You Want To Be An ARTIST IN RESIDENCE? and SECRETS OF MASTER ARTISTS

Carter's initial entrance into children's books came about because he was making up several stories every night for his daughter. When one of her friends spent the night she said, "Your stories are better than the ones I have at home. Why don't you have a book?" I illustrated a set of stories and sent them to all the publishers who published children's books and they were rejected. I never meant to be a children's book author so I quit. Then I took my dad to the doctor and while waiting for his appointment read an article that said if you wanted to be a children's book author not to send illustrations with your story. They said that the marketing department usually insists on matching an unknown author with a well known illustrator so there are some automatic sales to people who collect that illustrator. I took my illustrations off and sent the book back out. The first publisher I sent it to bought it. I waited until after TIGER DAVE was published and called back. I mentioned to the Editor that I had sent the story in before and they rejected it. She said, "I know and we loved your illustrations but the marketing department would not let us use them." I asked why they didn't just tell me that she said, "We didn't want to hurt your feelings."