Meet the author

K-Fai Steele.

Writer & illustrator · United States

K-Fai Steele: warm, funny author-illustrator whose expressive artwork, as in Lena the Chicken (But Really a Dinosaur!), makes joyful picture books about being unapologetically yourself.

K-Fai Steele is an American author-illustrator who grew up in rural Massachusetts in a house with a printing press her father bought from a magician, and who worked in art handling and public libraries before turning to picture books. Her debut as author-illustrator, A Normal Pig, drew on her own childhood experience of being othered, and she has since written and illustrated All Eyes on Ozzy!. She brings that same warm, expressive comedy to her illustration for other writers: in Linda Bailey's Lena the Chicken (But Really a Dinosaur!) her artwork gives a plucky little hen who knows in her bones she is a dinosaur all the ferociousness she needs to save the coop. A James Marshall Fellow and an Ezra Jack Keats/Kerlan Memorial Fellow, Steele makes joyful, empowering books about being different and being exactly who you are.