Raquel Jaramillo Palacio (born July 13, 1963) is an American author and

graphic designer A graphic designer is a professional within the graphic design and graphic arts industry who assembles together images, typography, or motion graphics to create a piece of design. A graphic designer creates the graphics primarily for publishe ...

. She is the author of several novels for children, including the best-selling ''

Wonder Wonder most commonly refers to: * Wonder (emotion), an emotion comparable to surprise that people feel when perceiving something rare or unexpected Wonder may also refer to: Arts and media Fictional entities * The Wonders, a fictional band ...

'', which was adapted into a 2017 film starring

Julia Roberts Julia Fiona Roberts (born October 28, 1967) is an American actress. Known for her leading roles in films encompassing a variety of genres, she has received multiple accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, and th ...

and

Owen Wilson Owen Cunningham Wilson (born November 18, 1968) is an American actor. He has had a long association with filmmaker Wes Anderson with whom he shared writing and acting credits for ''Bottle Rocket'' (1996), '' Rushmore'' (1998), and '' The Royal ...

Career

R.J began her career as an illustrator, designing book covers for

Paul Auster Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947) is an American writer and film director. His notable works include ''The New York Trilogy'' (1987), '' Moon Palace'' (1989), '' The Music of Chance'' (1990), ''The Book of Illusions'' (2002), '' The B ...

Thomas Pynchon Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. ( , ; born May 8, 1937) is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, Literary genre, genres and Theme (narrative), them ...

and others. During the course of her career she designed many hundreds of book covers, covering both fiction and non-fiction books. She also illustrated several children's books that she wrote herself. For the first two decades of her career, she wrote books at night after her day job as a designer. She illustrated her early books which were

board books A picture book combines visual and verbal narratives in a book format, most often aimed at young children. With the narrative told primarily through text, they are distinct from comics, which do so primarily through sequential images. The images ...

for children, published under the name Raquel Jaramillo. In 2021, Random House announced that her new novel ''Pony'' would have a first printing of 500,000 copies. It is her first novel not featuring characters from the Wonder universe.

Personal life

Born in New York City as the daughter of Colombian immigrants, Palacio attended Manhattan's High School of Art & Design and majored in illustration at the

Parsons School of Design Parsons School of Design, known colloquially as Parsons, is a private art and design college located in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Founded in 1896 after a group of progressive artists broke away from established Manhatt ...

. She spent a year at the

American University of Paris The American University of Paris (AUP) is a private, independent, and accredited liberal arts university in Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 ...

, travelling widely throughout Europe, before returning to New York. She currently lives in New York City together with her husband Russell Gordon, an executive art director at Simon and Schuster Children's Books, and their two sons Caleb and Joseph.

Awards and honors

She was a recipient of the

Christopher Award The Christopher Award (established 1949) is presented to the producers, directors, and writers of books, films and television specials that "affirm the highest values of the human spirit". It is given by The Christophers, a Christian organizatio ...

for ''Wonder'' in 2013, and the

Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children's Book Award The Vermont Golden Dome Book Award (formerly the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children's Book Award) annually recognizes one new American children's book selected by the vote of Vermont schoolchildren. It was inaugurated in 1957. The award is co-spon ...

in 2014. ''

'' was on The New York Times Best Seller list and was also on the Texas Bluebonnet Award master list. Wonder was the winner of the 2014 Maine Student Book Award, Vermont's

, the 2015 Mark Twain Award, Hawaii's 2015 Nene Award, the 2015 Young Hoosier Book Award, and the Junior Young Reader's Choice Award for 2015. In Illinois, it won both the Bluestem and Caudill Awards in 2014."Champagne Library Illinois Award Winners". Archived from the original on October 19, 2016.

Bibliography

* ''Ride, Baby, Ride'' (1998) * ''Dream, Baby, Dream!'' (1998) * ''Last Summer: A Little Book for Dads'' (2004) * ''Wonder'' (2012) * ''The Extraordinary'' (2012) * ''Auggie & Me: Three Wonder Stories'' (2014) * ''365 Days of Wonder: Mr. Browne's Book of Precepts'' (2014) * ''We're All Wonders'' (2017) * ''White Bird'' (2019) * ''Pony'' (2021)

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Palacio, R. J. American women novelists 1963 births Living people American writers of young adult literature American people of Colombian descent Pseudonymous women writers Women writers of young adult literature 21st-century American novelists 21st-century American women writers 21st-century pseudonymous writers Hispanic and Latino American writers Hispanic and Latino American people American women graphic designers Colombian American