Author/Illustrator J. C. Phillipps grew up in Perrysburg, Ohio where she spent most Saturdays taking classes at the Toledo Museum of Art.
After graduating as Valedictorian of Mason Senior High School, she went to study art and theater at Hope College in Holland, MI. It was during her time at Hope that Julie (that’s what the J stands for) first studied playwriting, which taught her about characters and plot development.
Julie lived in New York and Chicago for brief amounts of time before settling down in Boston, where she earned her MA at Emerson College and got married. For two and a half years, she taught the Kindergarten – 1st Grade group at an after-school program. This was the first time she looked at children’s books as an adult and decided she wanted to pursue a career in children’s literature.
Julie moved to Connecticut, had a son, acquired two cats (Boris and Natasha), and joined the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (Not in that order.) She attended a SCBWI Illustration Day in New York, where she acquired an agent and, soon after, sold her first book, Wink: The Ninja Who Wanted to Be Noticed.
Since then Julie has created and published four picture books traditionally, one picture book independently, and started working in middle grade graphic novels. She’s created the Pacey Packer Unicorn Tracker series and has begun work on a new spooky series, the first of which is The Ghost in Cabin 13.
J. C. Phillipps works from home. In warm weather she is often in the sunroom with her cats, where she writes on a laptop and illustrates on her iPad. She is also a watercolor artist who shows her work in the Greater Hartford area. She is a founding member of the WeHa Artists Emporium.
Follow her on Instagram @jcphillipps to see what she’s up to.
CONTACT
If you are a publisher, editor, or art director and would like to connect for a professional project, please contact her agent Michael Bourret of Dystel, Goderich & Bourret at mbourret@dystel.com
To contact her for information regarding author visits or other matters, please email her at julie_c@rocketmail.com