Shutta Crum

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Two years and 300-plus rejection slips later, she sold her first picture book, and she has since published eight others, including a young adult novel. That first book, Who Took My Hairy Toe?, a retelling of a scary southern folk tale, and still her young audiences' favorite, set the tone for several of her original stories that followed. Crum often mines her own southern small town roots — she was born in Paintsville, Kentucky, though raised in Michigan — for both the themes and the language of her books. Even when she's not writing about down-south settings, the southern storytelling tradition informs her work. She has also been writing poems all her life. Her books combine these long-honed skills as a wordsmith ("a barn all tumbled with hay"), her fine ear for southern dialect and expressions ("crazier than a june bug on a string"), and her storytelling gifts to create charming, funny, and often wise and comforting stories.

Crum well understands the restrictions of writing for children — a more limited vocabulary and many off-limits subjects, among others. But she also makes full use of the compensatory tools available to children's authors — a greater reliance on anthropomorphism and a more frequent use of rhyme, repetition, alliteration, and assonance than are usually found in adult writing.

In The Bravest of the Brave, a book she was invited to read at the 2005 Easter Egg Roll at the White House, a brave baby skunk faces and eventually turns tail — though doesn't fire — on a number of dangers before arriving home safely.