I have hugged a killer whale, performed in a Broadway musical with my eyes closed, danced at Cinderella’s castle past midnight, and have a knack for accomplishing the impossible. I love being a children’s book author.
I’ll start with what my younger friends usually want to know:
- I love ALL kinds of foods: Greek, Mexican, Korean, Puerto Rican, Thai, German, Italian, French, Japanese, Indian, American…. It’s easier to say what I don’t like: I don’t like food that still has eyeballs. Also – cow tongue weirds me out. I imagine that whatever I’m tasting could be tasting me back!
- Favorite color? White.
- I love to dance.
- My favorite movie is Ponyo, though Encanto is a close second. (Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella & the Billie Piper Mansfield Park are also great)
- My favorite picture book has been When the Sun Rose by Barbara Berger. (Other picture books that deeply influenced me were/are Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters by John Steptoe and Quick as a Cricket by Audrey Wood)
- Favorite shows: Bluey, Ruby and the Well, and whatever is new, imaginative, wholesome, and well-acted
- My family’s first pet was a fat toad named Bofus.
- My name is pronounced Kam-bree-uh Pet-it.
I grew up travelling, meeting fascinating people – and finding more and more places to love. My siblings and I would build forts in the backwoods of Pennsylvania. In Utah, we would watch for the Bear Lake monster, eating bowls of sun-drenched raspberries swimming in cream. Then we would go home to the fire sunsets of Arizona. I couldn’t get enough of flying above the clouds.
My degree is in Early Childhood Education with a specialization in Fine Arts plus an ESL endorsement. I have received many awards, but my favorite so far is that I graduated SUMO (summa) cum laude, since I’m small.
Before creating the beautiful (and hilarious) Sprouty Kids reading series, I published a picture book (Ursula the Ugly Unicorn) to raise money to free children from slavery. Before that, I wrote over 30 children’s books for a company in China – with a readership of over 300,000.
My bat biologist husband, our 8 children, and I have lived on every continent on the top half of the planet. We just moved back to the States and miss the island life of Okinawa, the food of Korea, the forests of Germany, all our friends, and so much more. That said, we are absolutely loving living near family.
Recent Interview:
https://voyageutah.com/interview/meet-kambrya-pettit-of-draper-but-really-amazon/