Ed Young was born on November 28th in Tientsin, China. At the age of three, his family moved to Shanghai. At that time, the city was divided into sections controlled by several European countries, so it was a diverse community. However, when Young was in high school, the Communists overtook Shanghai, so he went to Hong Kong to finish school. From there he traveled to the United States to study architecture. After three years, he Ed Young decided he no longer wanted to pursue that field. Instead, he went to Art Center College in Los Angeles, from which he graduated with a degree in illustration. Young moved to New York to take a job in an advertising firm, which put him in the path of Ursula Nordstrom at Harper & Row. She offered him his first children's book illustration job on The Mean Mouse and Other Mean Stories. The artist has won a Caldecott Medal for Lon Po Po, as well as Caldecott honors for The Emperor and the Kite and Seven Blind Mice. He has illustrated books for several Minnesota authors: Dreamcatcher by Audrey Osofsky (Orchard, 1992); October Smiled Back by Lisa Westberg Peters (Holt, 1996); The Hunter by Mary Casanova (Atheneum, 2000). Among his latest books is Beyond the Great Mountains, a most unusual and beautiful series of visual poems. Today he lives and works in New York state with his wife and two daughters.
