Harold Underdown

Harold is an independent editor who works with authors and publishers. He has worked at Macmillan, Orchard, and Charlesbridge, and has experience in trade and educational publishing. He has edited a variety of fiction and nonfiction in both picture book and chapter formats, including such titles as Yumi Heo’s One Afternoon, Laurence Pringle and Bob Marstall’s An Extraordinary Life, Lisa Rowe Fraustino’s Ash, Grace Lin’s The Ugly Vegetables, and Sneed Collard and Michael Rothman’s The Forest in the Clouds. He is also the editor for the Young Patriots Series, published by Patria Press. Harold enjoys teaching, and in that role wrote The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Children’s Book Publishing, now in its third edition. He founded and runs The Purple Crayon, a respected Web site with information about the children’s publishing world at www.underdown.org. He runs the Kids Book Revisions classes with colleague Eileen Robinson. He also speaks and gives workshops at conferences, including the SCBWI’s national conferences in Los Angeles and New York, the Highlights Writers Workshop at Chautauqua, and smaller conferences all over the country.