Mo Willems

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Mo Willems (born February 11, 1968) is an American writer, animator, and children's books author/illustrator.

After graduating from New York University's Tisch School for the Arts, Willems spent a year traveling around the world drawing a cartoon every day, all of which have been published in the book You Can Never Find a Rickshaw When it Monsoons. Returning to New York, he went on to write Emmy Award-winning scripts for Sesame Street from 1993 to 2002, perform stand-up comedy in NYC, and record essays for BBC Radio. He later created two animated television series: The Off-Beats for Nickelodeon's Kablam, and Sheep in the Big City for Cartoon Network. Sheep in the Big City was a success with the critics but ultimately failed to attract sufficient viewership and was cancelled after two seasons.

Willems later worked as head writer on the first four seasons of Codename: Kids Next Door, created by one of his colleagues from Sheep, Tom Warburton. He left the show to pursue his writing career, and has authored several books for young children including Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! (as well as the rest of the Pigeon series) and Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale, both of which were Caldecott Honor books, the latter of which won a Carnegie Medal in 2007 for its animated version. His latest book series is "Elephant and Piggie," an early reader series about a friendly elephant and pig.

Willems resides in Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York.

1 Trivia
2 Bibliography
- 2.1 As author
  - 2.1.1 Elephant and Piggie
- 2.2 As contributor
3 External links

[edit] Trivia

Based the character Trixie from Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale on his daughter.
Provided the voices of September and Grubby Groo on The Off-Beats.
The pigeon appears (at least once) in every book he writes.