Miriam Nerlove

Biography

I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio and received my master’s degree in printmaking from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. For a time I worked in the Photograph and Slide Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, while doing editorial illustration work for newspapers such as Barron’s and the Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly. I worked solely in pen and ink for the editorial work but began to get very interested in watercolor as I approached writing and illustrating for children. My first book, I Made a M...

Biography

I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio and received my master’s degree in printmaking from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. For a time I worked in the Photograph and Slide Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, while doing editorial illustration work for newspapers such as Barron’s and the Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly. I worked solely in pen and ink for the editorial work but began to get very interested in watercolor as I approached writing and illustrating for children. My first book, I Made a Mistake, was published by Atheneum, and further books include Flowers on the Wall, a story I was inspired to write from a photograph taken by Roman Vishniac on the eve of the Holocaust, which was published by Simon and Schuster/Margaret McElderry, in 1996. Other books I’ve written and illustrated include a series of holiday books for Albert Whitman and Company. I continue to experiment with watercolor and painting art for art’s sake, though I’ve recently gotten back into more pen and ink coupled with watercolor, as I try my hand at card illustrations for Recycled Paper Greetings in Chicago.