Chris Raschka: United States of America ★ Illustrator

“It’s not the thing itself but the path to understanding it that interests me”

Chris Raschka

Born in Huntington, Pennsylvania in 1959, Chris Raschka grew up with a love and a talent for stories, music, and art. After graduating from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biology, Raschka interned for a year in Germany at a children’s orthopedic clinic. Here he cultivated an understanding of children and desire to work with them. Raschka later lived and worked with his wife Lydie in St. Croix, Virgin Islands in a home for children, where they both cultivated their love of and talent for art, painting on their days off as a respite from the stress of the job. When the two returned to the states, their work was displayed and sold in a gallery, providing them with a first foray into the professional art world. Shortly after, Raschka was on the verge of attending medical school when he made the decision to follow his passion and pursue art as a career instead.

As an artist, Chris Raschka has become known for his ability to communicate emotions, energy, and especially music through his illustrations. His work shows a connection with and concern for children and the feelings that they are learning to deal with. His books for children are original and surprising, and focus on helping children develop processes of learning without pushing information at them. Using a variety of media including watercolor, charcoal, and potato prints, Raschka works to fit style with content in each of his books, giving each piece its own identity.

Raschka has received a lot of attention for the way in which he depicts sounds and music through art in books like John Coltrane’s Giant Steps and Charlie Parker Played Be-Bop, his first book, which won the Best Books of the Year citation, Publishers Weekly, the Notable Children’s Book citation, American Library Association (ALA), and the Pick of the Lists citation, American Booksellers Association. The awards did not stop with this first book either, and Raschka’s work has received many other awards and distinctions, including the Caldecott Honor for Yo! Yes? in 1994 and the Caldecott Medal for The Hello-Goodbye Window in 2006.