Today, the Free For All is positively gleeful to be celebrating the birthday of children’s author, cartoonist, and guy-who-has-all-the-jobs-I-ever-wanted, Mo Willems!
Mo Willems was born today near Chicago, and began drawing when still a toddler. However, as he noted, even at the age of four, he was monumentally annoyed by grown-ups who pretended to appreciate his work out of respect for his age. So he started writing funny stories to accompany his drawings, realizing that not even grown-ups could fake a belly laugh. After graduating from Tisch, he traveled around the world, drawing a cartoon a day (which became a book entitled You Can Never Find a Rickshaw When It Monsoons.
Following his return, Willems became a cartoonist for Sesame Street and Nickelodeon, while also performing stand-up and recording essays for the BBC (seriously, All The Jobs….). And while those gigs were all pretty successful, including the show Codename: Kids Next Door, on which Willems served as the head writer for four seasons, he left TV in 2003 in order to focus on his writing career.
Willems’ children’s books have that remarkable ability to appeal not only to their younger target audience, but to adults–and critics, as well. The New York Times Review of Books called his Pigeon “one of this decade’s contributions to the pantheon of great picture book characters.” Three of his books have been awarded the Caldecott Honor for “most distinguished American children’s picture book”: Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! (2004), Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale (2005), and Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity (2008). Trixie, the heroine of both Knuffle Bunny books, incidentally, is based on Willems’ own daughter, who was the main drive to get him to find a career which would let him work at home and have lunch with his daughter every day. “Trixie is funny.” He observed in an interview with the Springfield News, “My books aren’t quite as good as her jokes.”
Along with these honors, Willems’ Elephant and Piggie books have also won the Theodor Seuss Geisel Award for “author(s) and illustrator(s) of the most distinguished book for beginning readers published in English in the United States during the preceding year” in 2008 and 2009, and have won honors every year since 2011. In addition, my goddaughter thinks that they are great, and that, frankly, is the highest praise that I can give to a children’s book.
Anyone who has been anywhere near the Circulation Desk when one of Willems’ books comes in will know that time stops, and we all have to stop for a second and appreciate the delightfully quirky premises, heartfelt humor, and joyful exuberance that fills the pages of all his works, particularly The Pigeon Needs a Bath! (and this is coming from someone who is slightly terrified of pigeons, so you can imagine what it takes for me to say this). So, on this somewhat gloomy day, why not take a few moments to savor Mo Willems’ work at the Library, or by perusing the website run by The Pigeon himself!