ELIZABETH CODY KIMMEL BIOGRAPHY I BOOKS I PRESENTATIONS I BOOK ORDERING
Beth's books have been widely celebrated. Ice Story was named a Golden Kite Honor Book by the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. Ladies First: 40 Daring American Women Who Were Second to None was among the CBC Notable Trade Books in Social Studies and selected by the Washington Post as a KidsPost Book of the Week. Among the New York Public Library's 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing, School Spirit (a Suddenly Supernatural title) was also a featured Scholastic Book Club title. Adapted as a children's musical by the Vital Theatre Company in New York City, The Top Job was a Bank Street College Best Children's Book of the Year, on Tennessee 's Volunteer State Book Award Master List, and received a starred review in Booklist. The Boy on the Lion Throne, a biography of the Dalai Lama for young adults, for which the Dalai Lama wrote a foreword, was among Bank Street's 100 Best Children's Books of the Year for 2010. In the Stone Circle received the Minnesota Youth Reading Award, and In the Eye of the Storm (a Young Buffalo Bill title) won the Western Writers of America Spur Award. Beth's picture book, My Penguin Osbert, has been translated into nine languages, and a non-fiction essay she wrote about Lewis and Clark appeared in the anthology, Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out. Her newest book, The Reinvention of Moxie Roosevelt, a middle grade novel, received a starred review in School Library Journal.
Many of Beth's favorite subjects have worked their way into her books. Her love of the Antarctic, ghost stories, medieval history, penguins, and writers can all be found, one way or another, in her writing. For example, her perennially popular Lily B. books were inspired by an adolescence of unrequited love and too few cute clothes and Unhappy Medium (another Suddenly Supernatural title) came about from her musings about a visit to a massive Victorian structure called Mohonk Mountain House, built high up on the shore of a mountain lake in upstate New York .
Several of her books are very appealing to boys, including Ice Story: Shackleton's Lost Expedition; As Far As the Eye Can Reach: Lewis and Clark's Westward Quest; Dinosaur Bone War: Cope and Marsh's Fossil Feud; Before Columbus: The Leif Eriksson Expedition; The Look-It-Up Book of Explorers; Balto and the Great Race; and The Boy on the Lion Throne: The Childhood of the 14th Dalai Lama.
The recipient of the 2008 Alice Curtis Desmond Award, Beth is an editorial advisor for Walker Books, Ltd., is on the Board of Directors of Tibet Aid, and has reviewed manuscripts with the Rutgers University Council on Children's Literature One-on One Conference.
She lives in New York's Hudson Valley with her family.
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widely published author of 30 books for children and young adults,
Elizabeth Cody Kimmel was a zealous reader, buyer, and admirer
of books from a very early age. Born in New York City, she grew
up in Westchester County, and later Brussels, Belgium. She graduated
from the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York in 1982 and from
Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio in 1986.