Jack Prelutsky, an American poet, was born on September 8, 1940 in Brooklyn, New York. He went to public school in New York for elementary and middle school but went to the High School of Music and Art. After graduating, Prelutsky attended Hunter College. Ironically, Prelutsky developed a strong dislike for poetry because of the way it was taught to him while attending elementary school. He did take piano lessons and singing lessons and was regularly in his school’s productions.

Prelutsky worked as a busboy in a restaurant, a furniture mover, a folk singer, photographer and a cab driver. In his early twenties, he spent six months drawing made up animals. One evening, he wrote twenty four short poems to go with each imaginary animal he had drawn. With the encouragement from a friend, Prelutsky showed these twenty four pieces to an editor who fell in love with the poems. This editor, Susan Hirschman, is still his editor to this day, some 30 years later.

Prelutsky was married to a woman he met in France but then later divorced in 1995. He married again to his current wife, Carolynn, and they live together in Washington. He has written more than thirty collections of not only original verse, but anthologies of children’s poetry. In 2006, not only did he publish “Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant and Other Poems” and “The Beauty of the Beast: Poems from the Animal Kingdom,” he was also named the first Children’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. He currently spends time presenting poems to children throughout the United States, in both schools and libraries.