SATA

PERSONAL

Married; children: one daughter.

EDUCATION:

Scripps College, B.A.

ADDRESS

• Home - Boulder, CO.

CAREER

Artist and illustrator.

AVOCATIONS:

Argentine tango.

MEMBER:

Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.

AWARDS:

Portfolio Mentorship Award, Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, 2011; Thomas J. Watson Fellowship.

WRITINGS

• SELF-ILLUSTRATED
• ILLUSTRATOR
• The Fisherman & the Whale, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers (New York, NY), 2019
• Jumper: A Day in the Life of a Backyard Jumping Spider, Roaring Brook Press (New York, NY), 2023
• Joan Schoettler, Good Fortune in a Wrapping Cloth, Shen’s Books (Walnut Creek, CA), 2011
• Nancy Tupper Ling, The Story I’ll Tell, Lee & Low Books (New York, NY), 2015
• Suzanne Slade, Out of School and into Nature: The Anna Comstock Story, Sleeping Bear Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 2017
• Megan Dowd Lambert, A Kid of Their Own, Charlesbridge (Watertown, MA), 2019
• Curtis Manley, Just Right: Searching for the Goldilocks Planet, Roaring Brook Press (New York, NY), 2019
• Caroline McAlister, Finding Narnia: The Story of C.S. Lewis and His Brother, Roaring Brook Press (New York, NY), 2019
• Richard Ho, The Lost Package, Roaring Brook Press (New York, NY), 2021
• Melissa Stewart, Thank You, Moon, Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2023
• Eve M. Vavagiakis, I’m a Black Hole, MIT Kids Press (Somerville, MA), 2024
• In the World of Whales (Michelle Cusolito ; illustrated by Jessica Lanan), Neal Porter Books / Holiday House (New York, NY), 2025

SIDELIGHTS

Jessica Lanan is a children’s book illustrator based in Boulder, Colorado. She attended Scripps College, where she earned a B.A. in art. Lanan remarked on her website that it was an extended trip through Asia that inspired her to take up art for a living. “I traveled solo through Asia for a year and researched folk tales. I sang karaoke in Kagoshima and ate Khao Soi in Chiang Mai. I traversed the Himalayan foothills by donkey and sipped chai under an Indian sky as local musicians played their Ragas long into the night. I brought along a travel watercolor set and some sketchbooks and thus inadvertently began my illustration career,” she stated on her website.

Good Fortune in a Wrapping Cloth, written by Joan Schoettler, is Lanan’s first illustrated book. The story concerns Ji-su, a young Korean girl living in the eighteenth century. Her mother Eomma, a highly skilled seamstress, is chosen by the king to sew for the royal household. While this is an exceptional honor for the family, it means that Ji-su will be separated from her mother, perhaps forever. Eomma leaves her daughter a special sewing kit as a parting gift. In response, Ji-su becomes determined to raise her sewing skills to rival those of her mother, particularly in sewing wrapping cloths called bojagi. Over time, she perfects her abilities, and is herself selected to sew for the king, which leads to a welcome reunion with her mother. “With a masterful eye for color and skillful use of perspective,” Lanan “brings the text to life” while adding “depth to Ji-su’s emotions,” commented Anna Haase Krueger, writing in School Library Journal.

The Story I’ll Tell, written by Nancy Tupper Ling, is a “gentle and moving story of adoption and parental love that is sure to touch the hearts of readers everywhere, no matter how they came to be a family,” commented a writer on the Open Book Blog. As a Caucasian mother reads to her adopted child, an Asian boy, she anticipates that in the future, he will have many questions about his origins. She then unfolds a fanciful story that will explain where he came from and how he came to be adopted. The book is “filled with sensitive, imaginative illustrations” by Lanan, noted a Children’s Bookwatch contributor. A Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded that the text and art create an “unabashed love letter, one that many families will treasure.”

Out of School and into Nature: The Anna Comstock Story features text by Suzanne Slade. This picture book presents a biography of Anna Comstock, a scientist and teacher who lived in the late nineteenth century. Comstock was an early advocate of making schooling more activity-oriented. The teaching style of the time kept students indoors and at their desks. Comstock, on the other hand, felt that children would learn better if they were outdoors and actually immersed in nature where they could study plants, trees, insects, and the natural world up close. The story also includes information on Comstock’s early life, her scientific training, and the ways her engravings and illustrations of insects were used to educate not just children, but farmers as well. Throughout the book, “Lanan’s pencil-and-watercolor illustrations are done with affectionate attention to detail,” observed Erin Linsenmeyer in a Booklist review. A Kirkus Reviews writer called the volume an “inspirational must-read for budding scientists and those who teach them.”

Lanan illustrated Megan Dowd Lambert’s A Kid of Their Own. Rooster Clyde is none too happy when the farm animals tell him he has to crow less loudly so he doesn’t disturb new arrivals to the farm, Fran the goat and her kid Rowdy. The changes needed to accommodate the baby goat coincide with the arrival of Farmer Jay and Farmer Kevin preparing for their newly adopted child.

One of the most important scientific questions is posed in Just Right: Searching for the Goldilocks Planet, written by Curtis Manley and illustrated by Lanan: Are we alone in the universe? A young brown-skinned girl who asks this question visits a planetarium with her parents to learn the answer. Planets that may support life must be like Goldilocks’s preferences—not too hot, not too cold, not too big, not too small, but just right. The tools astronomers use to detect exoplanets are discussed, such as telescopes. Noted scientists like Carl Sagan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson are highlighted. In an interview on the Maria Marshall website, Lanan explained that her inspiration for Just Right came from her interest in astronomy when she was a child: “I never stopped being interested in the topic. With this project I was particularly excited by the prospect of depicting the surface of other planets and alien life. … I also enjoyed choosing the different historical figures to include and selecting the planets that the character discovers during her visit.” To complement Curtis’s science and history of exoplanet discovery, Lanan explained how she created the secondary narrative of the kids connecting with the information at a planetarium.

Writing in Horn Book about the girl’s interest in science, Danielle J. Ford remarked: “The clever use of a parallel narrative in the art … situates the images of possible other worlds in that character’s imagination.” A Kirkus Reviews critic noted: “Lanan effectively balances the girl’s visual narrative with the heavier scientific exposition of the text.”

Finding Narnia: The Story of C.S. Lewis and His Brother, written by Caroline McAlister and illustrated by Lanan, follows the childhood stories of C.S. “Jack” Lewis and his brother, Warren. In their Belfast home, the brothers played and made up stories—Jack liked knights and castles, while Warren liked steam engines and technology. As adults the two collaborated on the famed “Chronicles of Narnia” fantasy series, which incorporated the giant wardrobe the brothers played in and which reflected their experiences as wartime children and Britain’s rule over India. A Kirkus Reviews writer commented, “Lanan’s paintings combine homey views of the family’s Belfast house, pictures, maps, and diagrams of their imagined world.” Also praising Lanen’s illustrations, School Library Journal reviewer Jamie Jensen said they were “muted and ethereal, reflecting both the fantasy worlds created and the realities of a period in history tom by war.”

 

Author Richard Ho and illustrator Lanan follow postal mail that has been lost in The Lost Package. With scant dialog, the story follows a piece of mail from an empty box that is packed with items by an Asian American boy in New York, wrapped, addressed to a friend in San Francisco, and brought to the post office. But the package falls off the truck and is lost. A Black child finds it while, coincidently, he and his mother are moving to San Francisco. They take the box with them and deliver it to its intended recipient when they get there, making new friends in the process. Ho wrote the story as an homage to his father, who was a postal worker for thirty years. The illustrations “portray a broad range of settings, from gritty urban streets shimmering with rain to snow-swept terrains to a desolate gas station,” according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer. A Kirkus Reviews critic said, “Ho’s text places the box as its protagonist, giving Lanan ample space to develop the story around it.”

The nonfiction work Thank You, Moon, written by Melissa Stewart and illustrated by Lanan, explores ways that our closest companion in space influences life on Earth. Nocturnal animals use the shimmering light of the moon to hunt, hide, build nests, and pollinate. The pages follow the phases of the moon, showing how animals adjust to the waxing and waning of the moonlight. Elisabeth LeBris, a reviewer in School Library Journal, noted, “The lush watercolor illustrations are rich with nighttime details with the moon always clearly present.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews said that Stewart “invites readers to celebrate the moon’s beauty.”

In gouache and watercolor paintings, Lanan presents a wordless story of a fisherman and his son using a large net to catch fish in her debut self-illustrated title, The Fisherman & the Whale. When father and son inadvertently catch a whale in their net, the boy convinces his father to rescue the creature, and the man jumps in the water to cut the animal free. The angles viewing the action are situated from the air, underwater, and straight on. Once free, the whale jumps in the air for joy and the humans clap. “While there is occasional spot art, most spreads are full-bleed and place readers right at the center of the action,” declared Horn Book contributor Julie Danielson. Commenting on the tranquility of the sea portrayed in rich blue, Gaye Hinchliff in School Library Journal added: “The author’s note adds a helpful context to this fantasy.” Despite not showing any other fishing boats in the area or locating where the story takes place, “This compelling fictional introduction raises awareness and empathy for a very real environmental problem,” according to a Kirkus Reviews critic.

Lanan also wrote and illustrated Jumper: A Day in the Life of a Backyard Jumping Spider, which pays homage to the titular arachnid. A child visits a community garden, where it learns fun facts about the spider, including that it is the size of a small bean, can jump five times its body length, senses vibrations through its knees, and can walk on the ceiling. As the child plays, jumps, listens, and finds food, he mirrors the spider’s actions. “Throughout, imagination has been harnessed to engage with the natural world without anthropomorphism,” according to a contributor to Kirkus Reviews.

BIOCRIT

PERIODICALS

• Booklist, February 15, 2017, Erin Linsenmeyer, review of Out of School and into Nature: The Anna Comstock Story, p. 75.

• Children’s Bookwatch, December, 2011, review of Good Fortune in a Wrapping Cloth; February, 2016, review of The Story I’ll Tell.

• Horn Book, January-February 2019, Danielle J. Ford, review of Just Right: Searching for the Goldilocks Planet, p. 115; May-June 2019, Julie Danielson, review of The Fisherman & the Whale, p. 127.

• Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2015, review of The Story I’ll Tell; Jan. 15, 2017, review of Out of School and into Nature; November 15, 2018, review of Just Right; February 15, 2019, review of The Fisherman & the Whale; September 15, 2019, review of Finding Narnia: The Story of C.S. Lewis and His Brother; January 15, 2021, review of The Lost Package; August 15, 2023, review of Thank You, Moon; February 15, 2023, review of Jumper: A Day in the Life of a Backyard Jumping Spider.

• Publishers Weekly, August 31, 2015, review of The Story I’ll Tell, p. 92; December 2, 2015, review of The Story I’ll Tell, p. 32; February 13, 2017, review of Out of School and into Nature, p. 75; January 18, 2021, review of The Lost Package, p. 76.

• School Library Journal, November, 2011, Anna Haase Kruger, review of Good Fortune in a Wrapping Cloth, p. 94; March, 2017, Helen Foster James, review of Out of School and into Nature, p. 164; May 2019, Gaye Hinchliff, review of The Fisherman & the Whale, p. 85; December 2019, Jamie Jensen, review of Finding Narnia, p. 98; September 2023, Elisabeth LeBris, review of Thank You, Moon, p. 124.

ONLINE

• Jessica Lanan website, http://www.jessicalanan.com (October 19, 2023).

• Just a Note Blog, http://mariaashworth.wordpress.com/ (January 28, 2015), “Tiny Talk Tuesday with … Jessica Lanan,” author interview.

• Maria Marshall website, https://www.mariacmarshall.com/ (March 1, 2019), Maria Marshall, “The Picture Book Buzz—Interview with Jessica Lanan.”

• Open Book Blog, http://blog.leeandlow.com/ (April 26, 2016), “Illustrator Jessica Lanan Takes Us behind the Art of The Story I’ll Tell.”*