Who is Amy KR?

I found one of my favorite little hidden gems of a site, one that hardly anyone I’ve met knows about because they don’t follow specific authors as I do. This is website of Chicago-based children’s author, novelist, filmmaker, and general creator Amy Krouse Rosenthal, at http://www.whoisamy.com.

Her site is beautifully minimalistic, using only white and yellow as its main colors. On the home page, you can change how the yellow umbrella (a rather signature prop of Amy’s) can be shown: for a rainy day (open), sunny (closed), or windy (blown inside out with the letters flying off). You can also change the music or calming noises you hear as you browse the site.

Amy has plenty of pages devoted to her various genres of books, such as her autobiography in the form of an encyclopedia below. With links to buy all her books for children or adults, she makes her site extremely easy to navigate, and it’s fun just to click each page and see what each one holds.

Amy’s most famous project has been an ongoing film called The Beckoning of Lovely. Having gone viral on YouTube, its first filmed endeavor was as an event on 8/8/08 at 8:08pm at Chicago’s famous bean-shaped sculpture, Cloud Gate, where Amy and several hundred strangers met and “made a bunch of stuff together”. This giant spontaneous collaboration of talented gifts, beautiful people and small good deeds inspired Amy to go further and create the first completely user-generated feature film. She took ideas and submission from people all over the world, as well as continued to make YouTube videos every year on 9/9/09, 10/10/10. etc, which are all stored at the appropriate page on her website.

Amy has long been an inspiration to many people, including myself, and I was lucky enough to be at Cloud Gate for Independence Day 2011 and got to meet her and her family. She was a wonderfully reflective and wise person, and her site shows that in spades. Even the contact page is made up of a globe, connecting everyone around the world to a woman who can truly bring people together in a way I’ve never seen before or since.