Lynne Cherry
Lynne Cherry (born January 5, 1952) is an American author and illustrator of nature-themed children's books, book essays and journal articles and a film producer. In 2009 she was designated a Women's History Month Honoree by the National Women's History Project. Early life. Born in Philadelphia, Cherry attended the Tyler School of Art and received her teaching degree from [Temple University]. She earned an MA in History from Yale University. Career. Cherry founded and was director of the Center for Children's Environmental Literature, She has been an artist-in-residence at the Princeton  Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, the Princeton Environmental Institute, the World Wildlife Fund, Cornell University, the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, NASA Goddard and the Benjamin Center at SUNY, New Paltz. Her most famous book (which has sold over a million copies and was on the New York Times best-seller list),"The Great Kapok Tree", is a picture book about the ecological importance of the Amazon rainforest. Other books include "Flute's Journey" (a book about the trials and tribulations of a wood thrush named Flute) bird migration) and "A River Ran  Wild" (which discusses the history - and the polluting and eventual cleanup of the Nashua River in Massachusetts). Activism. Since 2008, Lynne has focused her attention on abating climate change and highlighting the power that young people have to take action and alert adults to the climate crisis. She is founder and director of the non-profit Young Voices on Climate Change aka Young Voices for the Planet. Through YVFP she has produced 13 short documentary films - the Young Voices for the Planet film series- dedicated to inspiring young people to believe in their ability to make change and take action  inspired by the youth success stories in the films. The films have been licensed by American Public Television and were broadcast on PBS stations nationwide. An accompanying curriculum was on the PBS Learning Media website. The films have been licensed by National Geographic, the Children's Environmental Literacy Foundation (CELF), Earth Day Network and dozens of other organizations and are used widely by educators to help develop youth self-efficacy - their belief in themselves to make a difference in the world. Cherry's [Young Voices for the Planet] films document California kids getting a ban on plastic bags "Team Marine ; Florida students saving their school $53,000 in energy bills Dreaming in Green"; and 11-year-old Felix Finkbeiner from Germany planting a million trees ("Plant for the Planet"). When the three 9-year-old girls in "Save Tomorrow" see the other Young Voices for the Planet films, they are inspired to testify at their Town Meeting where they succeed in overturning a bill prohibiting solar panels on town buildings. (Solar panels were then installed on all town buildings). "Olivia's Birds and the Oil Spill" features a girl from Long Island, NY who raised $200,000 to help save  and clean oiled birds from the BP spill or getting fresh, local, healthy & nutritious cafeteria and calculating the "food miles" that their cafeteria fare travels "Longing for a Local Lunch". Cherry also wrote a chapter for the National Geographic book "Written in Water" and the chapter "Kids Can Save Forests" in "Treetops at Risk" (Springer Verlag, 2013), edited by Margaret D. Lowman (Canopy Meg), et al. She has spoken out widely eschewing gloom and doom in climate change education and communication - on an NPR radio show and in book chapters "Teaching Climate Change with Hope and Solutions" in the book  Education in Times of Environmental Crisis: Teaching Children to be Agents of Change (Routledge, 2016) and blogs. Honors and recognition. Lynne Cherry's book "How We Know What We Know about Our Changing Climate", written with the late photojournalist Gary Braasch, has won more than 15 awards including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) award for the Best Middle School Science Book of 2009. Cherry's book "The Sea, the Storm and the Mangrove Tangle", written and illustrated herself won the first Green Earth Book Award for picture books in 2005. Lynne Cherry has been Artist in  Residence at Princeton University, the [Smithsonian], Woods Hole Research Center, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. She has been a visiting scholar in the Geosciences Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, NY; the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado, Boulder; and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, NY.