Biography

Carmen Oliver is the author of many award-winning picture books for children including the most recent 2022 Writers League of Texas Children’s Picture Book award for Building an Orchestra of Hope: How Favio Chavez Taught Children to Make Music From Trash, a Junior Library Gold Standard. She’s also the author of A Voice for the Spirit Bears: How One Boy Inspired Millions to Save a Rare Animal, a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard, The Twilight Library, and the Bears Make the Best Buddies series (Reading, Writing, Math, Science).

Carmen’s work has been shortlisted for the Rainforest of Reading Award, The Writers’ League of Texas Awards and the CLEL Bell Picture Book Awards for Early Literacy. In 2014, she founded the Booking Biz, a boutique style agency that brings award-winning children’s authors and illustrators to schools, libraries, and special events. She also teaches writing at the Writing Barn and The Highlights Foundation and loves speaking at schools, conferences and festivals.

Carmen is represented by Erzsi Deàk of Hen & ink Literary Studio.

Autobiography

Carmen’s reading buddy was a yellow duck ride-on toy. Together, they wheeled around her world reading nursery rhymes by Mother Goose, poems from Shel Silverstein, and picture books by Dr. Seuss. With her grandmother, they read her favorite book Sandman’s Stories of Twinkle-Eyes before bed. At night, she dreamt about the mice characters living inside the kitchen pantry and the wily cat Puss that dogged their every move. Story was rooted inside of her and before long she began planting story seeds of her own.

She grew up in southern Manitoba, Canada, surrounded by lakes and prairie grasses. She built tree forts, caught tadpoles, sailed on homemade rafts and concocted mud pies and snow slushies. In high school, she anchored on the TV and radio station and wrote for the school newspaper, but eventually she entered a computer science program at college and began writing as a programmer analyst. In 2000, she married an amazing man and their three beautiful children became her new reading buddies. Inspired by parenthood, she cultivated new stories and nurtured them until they blossomed and produced fruit. Bears Make the Best Reading Buddies is her debut picture book. When she’s not writing, she loves gardening, cheering on her kids from the sidelines and blue-sky days. Carmen lives in Round Rock, TX with her family.

 

Fact or Fiction?

Carmen was a recruit for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police? Fact.

Carmen devours salsa and chips? Fact.

Carmen attended a Minnesota Twins game in Minneapolis, a Green Bay Packers game in Green Bay, and a San Francisco Giants game in San Francisco? Fact.

Carmen sailed with her dad in a hot-air balloon? Fiction.

Her brother hot-air ballooned with their dad? Fact.

Carmen is afraid of heights? Fact.

Carmen broke her right leg in a skiing accident? Fact.

Carmen lives in a tree house? Fiction. She wishes she did? Fact.