SATA

PERSONAL

Male.

ADDRESS

• Home - Western, NY.

CAREER

Designer and writer. Has worked with the Muppets at Jim Henson Productions, as a special-effects moldmaker, and designing software, toys, accessories, clothing, and other children’s consumer products. Has also written and performed comedy.

WRITINGS

• ScrapKins: Junk Re-thunk, Christy Ottaviano Books/Henry Holt (New York, NY), 2016
• Pirate Chicken: All Hens on Deck, illustrated by Jess Pauwels, Sourcebooks Jabberwocky (Naperville, IL), 2019
• Shark and Bot, Random House Children’s Books (New York, NY), 2020
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SIDELIGHTS

Brian Yanish is a designer and writer who gained renown for his creation of ScrapKins, a program promoting the use of recycled materials in original artistic creations. His work as a designer has taken him behind the scenes with Jim Henson Productions and into special-effects laboratories, and he has designed various commercial products for children, including toys, games, and apparel. It was in 2007 that he created ScrapKins, which offers hands-on STEAM workshops—adding the arts to STEM activities—in repurposing junk and recyclable items into works of art. Through ScrapKins, Yanish has worked with organizations including Sesame Workshop, the American Museum of Natural History, the Maryland Science Center, the New York Hall of Science, the Boston Children’s Museum, and the World Science Festival.

Yanish’s success with ScrapKins led to the publication of his first children’s book, the self-illustrated ScrapKins: Junk Re-thunk, a combination comic, craft, and activity book. Living in Scrap City are a band of monsters, the ScrapKins, each of whom has a distinct trait as they sort through the junk surrounding them. Itcher, for one, likes smelly things, while Stacker likes to catalog and organize. Interspersed throughout the tale are pencil puzzles, games, and especially craft projects, with plenty of suggestions for do-it-yourself fun. In Booklist, Kara Dean observed that the “fictional narrative is an interesting way to keep children invested in the concept of recycling.” She observed that ScrapKins will have plenty of appeal for “crafters and seekers of rainy-day projects.”

Pirate Chicken: All Hens on Deck, a picture book by Yanish illustrated by Jess Pauwels, finds inventive overachiever Lily and her fellow barnyard chickens captured and whisked off to sea by a band of pirates. Seizing her chance when the pirates all go ashore, Lily commandeers the ship and takes charge as Redfoot. Becoming a dastardly buccaneer herself, Lily proves too tyrannical for her crew, and when they mutiny, she has to figure out how not to end up walking the plank. A Publishers Weekly reviewer found that Pauwels’s “high-spirited cartoons” help make Pirate Chicken “an amusing spoof with an unstoppable feathered force at its center.” A Kirkus Reviews writer suggested that the avian band of “merry swashclucklers shows that a sense of curiosity and willingness to learn can give you the tools you need to conquer any situation.”

Opening a self-illustrated, interactive graphic-novel series for Yanish is Shark and Bot, about the unlikely friendship between a shark and a robot. Having just moved from Australia with his stuffed wombat in tow, Shark finds himself getting along best with a Model R-2300 Cutting Robot he meets in the park. They bond over a shared love of Glo-Nuts graphic novels (excerpts included) featuring mutant doughnuts with superpowers. When bullies try to take over the park, Shark and Bot come up with the perfect means of easing the tension: a dance battle.

A Kirkus Reviews writer praised the “enjoyable mix of goofiness and metafiction” in this “funny tale of awkwardness overcome in big, inviting panels.” A Publishers Weekly contributor declared that with Shark and Bot, Yanish hits the “sweet spot of genial, straightforward compositions and highly polished comic rhythms,” with plenty of fun found in the fast friends’ “geeking out and cracking wise.”

BIOCRIT

PERIODICALS

• Booklist, May 15, 2016, Kara Dean, review of ScrapKins: Junk Re-thunk, p. 52.

• Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2018, review of Pirate Chicken: All Hens on Deck; June 1, 2020, review of Shark and Bot.

• Publishers Weekly, December 17, 2018, review of Pirate Chicken, p. 139; August 31, 2020, review of Shark and Bot, p. 63.

ONLINE

• Brian Yanish website, http://www.brianyanish.com (February 19, 2021).*