Lea Lyon is an award-winning Bay Area author and illustrator and a former Illustrator Coordinator for the SCBWI San Francisco chapter. She is the co-author of Ready to Fly: How Sylvia Townsend Became the Bookmobile Ballerina (HarperCollins, 2020), the true story of a Black girl in the 1950s who wanted to be a ballerina and who taught herself to dance ballet with library books. Ready to Fly is a Scholastic Book Club pick and was on the Independent Bookstore Kids Next list. Lyon also developed and illustrated It Rained Warm Bread (Holt, 2019), a middle grade illustrated novella about the Holocaust by Hope Anita Smith and Gloria Moskowitz-Sweet. Its honors include a starred review from Kirkus, a Best Nonfiction Book in Verse for Young Readers from Kirkus, and an ALA Notable book. Her young adult nonfiction title The Double V Campaign: African-Americans Fighting for Freedom at Home and Abroad tells the story of the WWII-era civil rights movement that set the stage for equal rights battles in subsequent decades and was praised as “outstanding” by the Association of Children’s Librarians.
Lea is represented by Abigail Samoun.
