Robin Preiss Glasser

Biography

Glasser was raised in a Jewish family in Poughkeepsie, New York, one of four sisters including the children's writer Jacqueline Preiss Weitzman. She has had two successful careers, the first as a ballet dancer and the second as an illustrator. She began her career as a soloist with the Pennsylvania Ballet, until injury forced her to leave. She returned to school at age 30 and earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Parsons The New School for Design. After graduation, it took five years for her big break, when she was asked to illustrate Alexander, Who's Not (Do You Hear Me? I Mean It!) Going to Move by Judith Viorst, published by Atheneum Books in 1995. It was a sequel to the extraordinarily successful Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (Atheneum, 1972) and Glasser worked "in the style of Ray Cruz," the original illustrator. She and her sister, Jacqueline Weitzman, collaborated on You Can't Take a Balloon Into the Metropolitan Museum, which featured an adventure through the streets of New York City and was named an ALA Notable Book for 1998. (You Can't Take a Balloon is Glasser's second-published title in the Library of Congress catalog.) Since then she has illustrated picture books with writers including radio star Garrison Keillor, poet Elizabeth Garton Scanlon, and Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York.

She also collaborated on three books with Lynne Cheney, the wife of the then Vice President, whom she first met in 2001. Her illustrations for America, A Patriotic Primer were described as "the greatest strength of this ambitious project, with endearing children of all colors, kinds, and cultures, and dozens of historical figures and sites rendered in carefully researched detail."

In 2005 Glasser was paired with the writer Jane O’Connor to illustrate the Fancy Nancy books, where her "action-filled pen-and-ink drawings put Nancy in wild tutus, ruby slippers, fairy wings and fuzzy slippers". Books in the series, which now number upwards of 80 titles, have spent over 330 weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list, and have sold more than 30 million volumes. The Children's Book Council named her 2013 Illustrator of the Year for Fancy Nancy and the Mermaid Ballet after more than one million young people cast their votes in the 6th annual Children's Choice Book Awards. And Disney Junior has signed to make an animated tv series about her most popular character.

In 2015 Glasser was named one of 100 Most Influential people in Orange County, California,. She lives in San Juan Capistrano with her husband, attorney Robert Berman. Glasser has a son and a daughter. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2012, but has since recovered.