Jeanette Winter, who illuminated the lives of notable women in the children’s books she wrote and illustrated, has died at 86, Simon & Schuster announced in a news release.
Winter was born in Chicago to Swedish immigrants and was educated at the University of Iowa. She made her literary debut in 1968 with The Christmas Visitors, and went on to publish more than 65 works, including Follow the Drinking Gourd, Klara’s New World, The Christmas Tree Ship, My Baby, and Niño’s Mask.
Many of her books told stories about accomplished real-life women, including Josefina, about artist Josefina Aguilar; My Name Is Georgia, about painter Georgia O’Keeffe; Emily Dickinson’s Letters to the World; Beatrix, about author Beatrix Potter, and Sisters, about tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams. Her 2019 book Our House Is on Fire: Greta Thunberg’s Call to Save the Planet has been translated into 21 languages.
She illustrated several books by her son Jonah Winter, including Diego, The Secret World of Hildegard, The Secret Project, Oil, The Little Owl & the Big Tree, and The Snow Man.
Allyn Johnston, Winter’s longtime editor and the vice president and publisher of Beach Lane Books, said in a statement, “Jeanette Winter was bold and fierce and yes, stubborn, and she was a visionary.…This past May, Jeanette completed and sent me a new book inspired by the loss of my family’s 89-year-old home in the Los Angeles fires—and a story I’d told her about the calla lilies that had reappeared in the burned garden only a few months after the fire.…You can bet I am going to go back into that fire project of hers, in the hope that there is indeed a picture book waiting inside it, biding its time before bursting out into the world, like those stubborn and beautiful calla lilies that inspired it.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
