Lynne Cherry


Lynne Cherry 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.

Early life

Born in Philadelphia, Cherry attended the Tyler School of Art and Yale University.

Career

She founded and was director of the Center for Children's Environmental Literature, 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 and A River Ran Wild.

Activism

Since 2008, Lynne has focused her attention on abating climate change and highlighting the power that young people have to take action and wake up adults to the climate crisis. She is founder and director of the non-profit Young Voices on Climate Change. Through YVCC she has produced 13 short documentary films - the Young Voices for the Planet film series- dedicated to helping young voices be heard by featuring youth success stories. The films are licensed by American Public Television, are currently being broadcast on 60 PBS stations nationwide and have curriculum on the PBS Learning Media website. The films have been licensed by National Geographic, Earth Day Network and dozens of other organizations and are used widely by educators to help develop youth self-efficacy - their belief in themselves to make a difference in the world.
Cherry's films document California kids getting a ban on plastic bags Team Marine; Florida students saving their school $53,000 in energy bills Dreaming in Green; and 11-year-old Felix Finkbeiner from Germany planting a million trees. When the three 9-year-old girls in Save Tomorrow see the other Young Voices for the Planet films, they are inspired to testify at their Town Meeting where they succeed in overturning a bill prohibiting solar panels on town buildings.. Olivia's Birds and the Oil Spill features a girl from Long Island, NY who raised $200,000 to help save and clean oiled birds from the BP spill or getting fresh, local, healthy & nutritious cafeteria and calculating the "food miles" that their cafeteria fare travels Longing for a Local Lunch.
Cherry also wrote a chapter for the National Geographic book Written in Water and the chapter "Kids Can Save Forests" in Treetops at Risk, edited by Margaret D. Lowman, et al. She has spoken out widely eschewing gloom and doom in climate change education and communication - on an NPR radio show and in book chapters "Teaching Climate Change with Hope and Solutions" in the book Education in Times of Environmental Crisis: Teaching Children to be Agents of Change and blogs.

Honors and recognition

Lynne Cherry's book How We Know What We Know about Our Changing Climate, written with the late photojournalist Gary Braasch, has won more than 15 awards including the American Association for the Advancement of Science award for the Best Middle School Science Book of 2009.
Lynne Cherry has been Artist in Residence at Princeton University, the , 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 at the University of Colorado, Boulder; and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, NY.