Please feel free to use any of these bios verbatim or to combine them, or to adapt them to best suit your purposes.

A Short Bio (100 words)

Kathy has loved reading all her life but was almost thirty before she discovered she loves writing too. She has become the author of many picture books that have been published internationally, including the classic Red Is Best, and the award-winning The Man with the Violin. She has more on the way. She is also a novelist, short story writer, and poet.

Mother, stepmother, and grandmother, Kathy is still an avid reader. When not reading or writing, she enjoys photography, jigsaw puzzles, crossword puzzles, and walking in the woods and fields near her home in Rockwood, Ontario.

A Very Short Bio (20 words)

Kathy Stinson, best known for her award-winning children's books, is also a poet, novelist, short story writer, and jigsaw puzzler.

A Long Bio (250 words)

Kathy Stinson has loved reading since before she started school. She sorted mail, taught elementary school, and worked as a waitress before it occurred to her that she might like writing too.

An argument with her daughter about what the three-year-old would wear one day led to the writing of her first book, Red Is Best, which quickly became a classic. That book and Big Or Little? were two of the first picture books for toddlers published in Canada.

Kathy has since written a wide range of books: picture books, non-fiction, young adult fiction, historical fiction, horror, biography, series books, stories in anthologies and magazines, and poetry.

“What you read,” she says, “influences what you write. And so does the day to day life that you live.”

Kathy has enjoyed the privilege of meeting with readers in every province and territory of Canada, in the United States, Britain, Liberia, and Korea. She has worked as a freelance editor for a number of writers and publishers and has served as Writer-in-Residence for several library systems in Ontario. She has also led writing workshops all across Canada and in Africa.

An avid amateur photographer and a retired, 20-year volunteer reader and technician for the CNIB, Kathy is the mother of two grown children, stepmother of two more, and the grandmother of six. She currently lives in Rockwood, Ontario — originally home to the Anishinabewaki, Haudenosaunee, Attiwonderonk, and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nations — with her partner, Peter Carver.