Lynne Cherry

Lynne Cherry (born January 5, 1952)^[1] is an American writer and illustrator of nature-themed children's books and a film producer. In 2009 she was designated a Women's History Month Honoree by the National Women's History Project.^[2]

Born in Philadelphia, Cherry attended the Tyler School of Art and Yale University. She has served as director of the Center for Children's Environmental Literature,^[3] and has also been an artist-in-residence for the Princeton Environmental Institute, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Smithsonian Institution. One of her best-known books is The Great Kapok Tree, a picture book about the Amazon rainforest. Other books include Flute's Journey (a book about bird migration) and A River Ran Wild (which discusses the cleanup of the Nashua River in Massachusetts).^[4]

Lynne has recently turned her attention to the climate crisis. She is founder and director of the non-profit Young Voices on Climate Change. Through YVCC she has produced a series of films dedicated to helping the voices of environmentally-concerned young people be heard by featuring youth success stories in a series of DVDs. The short films show California kids getting a ban on plastic bags; Florida students saving their school $53,000 in energy costs; and Felix Finkbeiner, an 11-year-old German boy planting a million trees (see Plant-for-the-Planet initiative). Olivia's Birds and the Oil Spill features a girl from Islip, New York who raised $200,000 to help save and clean oiled birds from oil spills. Longing for a Local Lunch, filmed in 2013, documents four high school students in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, who succeed in getting fresh, local, healthy & nutritious cafeteria and calculate the "food miles" that their cafeteria fare travels.

The book How We Know What We Know about Our Changing Climate, written with Gary Braasch, has won more than 15 awards including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) award for the Best Middle Grade Science Book of 2009. Cherry also wrote a chapter for the National Geographic book Written in Water and a chapter entitled "Kids Can Save Forests" in Treetops at Risk (Springer Verlag, 2013), edited by Margaret D. Lowman (Canopy Meg), et al.

Cherry has been Artist in Residence at 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.

References

External links

• Official website
• YoungVoicesonClimateChange.com – film series by Cherry's nonprofit association YVCC(?)
• YoungVoicesforthePlanet.com – film series by National Geographic(?)
• Lynne Cherry at Library of Congress Authorities, with 41 catalog records