Joyfulness - Maintaining a good attitude, even when faced with difficulty. Taking time out of every day to smile, laugh, and sing.

Uri Shulevitz’s birthday is on February 27th.

Beloved children’s author/illustrator Uri Shulevitz was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1935, into a world on the brink of a terrible war. He began drawing when he was three. As Jews facing the encroaching Nazi regime, Uri and his family were in great danger, from both bombs and persecution. (Once, in 1939, a bomb fell into the stairwell outside Uri’s apartment, when he was at home.) When Uri was four, the family fled Warsaw and began an eight-year wandering existence as refugees. When they finally landed someplace permanent, it was Paris in 1947–a wonderful place for twelve-year-old Uri to be an artist. He soon began winning awards for his work.

In 1949, the family moved again, to Israel. There, Uri studied art, literature, and the sciences, and worked a variety of jobs. In 1956, during the Sinai War, he joined the Israeli Army for a compulsory two-year term of service. When he got out, he joined a kibbutz for a year; then, in 1959, he immigrated to the United States, settling in New York City.

In New York, he perfected his craft, taking classes at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and working as an illustrator. In 1962, an editor saw his portfolio and suggested he write children’s books. He created his first picture book, The Moon in My Room, in 1963.

Uri has won numerous awards for his work, including a 1969 Caldecott Medal for The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, a collaboration with Arthur Ransome. He has also won several Caldecott Honors.

In an interview for an article, Uri once spoke of his initial difficulty writing, when he became too focused on using the correct words. His problems vanished when he instead began concentrating on what he wanted to say: “I realized that all I had to do was communicate the action as simply as possible. The few words necessary to communicate the story fell into place on their own. It was all so simple and natural.”

Uri lives in New York City.