Dashka Slater author page

Dashka Slater biography

Dashka Slater writes fiction and nonfiction for children, teenagers and adults. She is also an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Salon and Mother Jones. She received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her picture books include Baby Shoes, Firefighters in the Dark, The Sea Serpent and Me, Dangerously Ever After, Wild Blue: Taming a Big-Kid Bike and Deep Blue: Swimming in the Big Blue Sea. Baby Shoes was named one of the best children’s books of 2006 by Booklist and Nick Jr. magazines, and The Sea Serpent and Me was a Junior Library Guild Selection and a finalist for the Cybil and Chickadee Awards.

For older readers, Slater wrote The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives. The book won the ALA Stonewall Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, and it was a finalist for the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction. Her middle-grade fantasy work includes The Feylawn Chronicles, which includes The Book of Stolen Time and The Book of Fatal Errors. She also created the Escargot picture-book series with illustrator Sydney Hanson; the series includes Escargot, A Book for Escargot, Good Night, Escargot, Love, Escargot and Escargot and the Search for Spring. Her forthcoming middle-grade nonfiction book The Wild Season: The Remarkable True Story of a Rabbit Rescue is scheduled for publication on 8 September 2026.