Picture book author and illustrator Janell Cannon was born November 3, 1957, in St. Paul, Minnesota. The left-handed artist claims she drew so much in high school that her hand was perpetually black from smearing the ink of her favorite Bic pens. Cannon worked at the Carlsbad Library in southern California, where she discovered that there were few books about bats available for children, so she decided to make her own. The result, Stellaluna (1994), became a best seller, allowing Cannon to leave her job at the library and write Trupp: A Fuzzhead Tale (1995), and other books. Janell Cannon lives in California.