Jan Brett is one of the nation’s leading author illustrators of children’s books, and she has over thirty five million books in print.  She lives in a seacoast town in Massachusetts but she travels all over the world to different places for inspiration. Jan Brett knew at a very young age that she wanted to be an illustrator. As a child she spent many hours drawing and reading.  She says, "I remember the special quiet of rainy days when I felt that I could enter the pages of my beautiful picture books. Now I try to recreate that feeling of believing that the imaginary place I'm drawing really exists. The detail in my work helps to convince me, and I hope others as well, that such places might be real." When Jan visits different places she studies the culture, the architecture, and costumes, which we get to see in her artwork when we read her books. "From cave paintings to Norwegian sleighs, to Japanese gardens, I study the traditions of the many countries I visit and use them as a starting point for my children's books." Jan Brett has become one of my favorite author/Illustrators. Becky Farris introduced me to her books when I first started this program and I took the Reading 1 class. All of her books seem to have a story within a story, because as the reader is reading the book there is a border around every page that contains pictures that are telling a whole different part of the story.