Award-winning author-illustrator Betsy James has written and/or illustrated many books for children and young adults. She lives in New Mexico where she hikes, grows corn, and shares the shade of a cottonwood tree with roadrunners, lizards, and several humongous toads.

Betsy was born in Missouri and grew up in Utah. With a geologist father and a zoologist mother, she learned to pay attention to rocks and animals, two things which still interest her today. With her brothers she went camping (hated it), roasted marshmallows (loved it) and stayed up too late reading. These days she loves camping, hates marshmallows, and stays up too late reading.

She went to Mount Holyoke college and the University of Utah. With a BA in English and no teaching certificate, "waitress in a pizza parlor" was the least strange of her jobs. Teaching herself to be an illustrator, she made medical drawings for the inventors of the artificial heart, drew mayflies under a microscope, and sketched skeletons at an archaeological dig in Mexico, where she learned to speak Spanish and eat really hot food.

People who love Spanish and green chile chicken enchiladas can't survive anywhere but New Mexico, so that's where Betsy's been ever since. Her absolutely favorite thing to do is to hike in the desert, picking up rocks. She owns a very large backpack, six pairs of hiking boots, and far too many rocks.

Betsy's work ranges from picture books to young adult novels, realistic fiction to fantasy. She does her own illustration about half the time. She works as a freelance illustrator, paints, and walks along irrigation ditches quacking at the ducks.

Besides writing, illustrating, and quacking, she does effective, lively, and usually loud book talks and workshops - all illustrated on the spot - for schools and adults and anybody else you can think of. She can teach in Spanish, too! Her favorite place to teach is Zuni Pueblo, where she has co-led an elementary-school writer's workshop for years, laughed too hard, learned to say "Yuck!" in Zuni, and washed about a million dishes.

For information of Betsy's school talks and presentations, click here.

Betsy deports a rattlesnake from her yard in New Mexico
to a new home farther out in the desert.
"Kids! Don't try this at home!"