Jason Chin

OK
About Jason Chin
Caldecott Medalist Jason Chin is the author and illustrator of numerous award-winning picture books. His newest book is WATERCRESS by Andrea Wang, received the 2022 Caldecott Medal, a Newbery Honor and APALA Award. His most recent authored title, YOUR PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE, won the Cook Prize and was a 2020 Horn Book Fanfare title. His book GRAND CANYON received both a Caldecott Honor and a Sibert Honor, and won the 2018 Orbis Pictus Award.
He is the author of the award-winning books REDWOODS; ISLAND: A Story of the Galápagos (winner of the 2013 Gryphon Award), and GRAVITY(a Gryphon Honor book). WATER IS WATER, written by Miranda Paul, was a 2016 ALA Notable Book and CORAL REEFS was nominated for the Texas Bluebonnet Award.
Jason lives in Vermont with his wife, Deirdre Gill, and their two children.
Customers Also Bought Items By
Author updates
Books By Jason Chin
What keeps objects from floating out of your hand?
What if your feet drifted away from the ground?
What stops everything from floating into space?
Gravity.
As in his previous books, Redwoods, Coral Reefs, and Island, Jason Chin has taken a complex subject and made it brilliantly accessible to young readers in this unusual, innovative, and very beautiful book.
Chin's approach makes this book a must-have common core tool for teachers and librarians introducing scientific principals to young students.
A Neal Porter Book
Newbery Honor Book
APALA Award Winner
A story about the power of sharing memories—including the painful ones—and the way our heritage stays with and shapes us, even when we don’t see it.
New England Book Award Winner
A New York Times Best Children’s Book of the Year
A Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Book
While driving through Ohio in an old Pontiac, a young girl's Chinese immigrant parents spot watercress growing wild in a ditch by the side of the road. They stop the car, grabbing rusty scissors and an old paper bag, and the whole family wades into the mud to gather as much as they can.
At first, she's embarrassed. Why can't her family just get food from the grocery store, like everyone else? But when her mother shares a bittersweet story of her family history in China, the girl learns to appreciate the fresh food they foraged—and the memories left behind in pursuit of a new life.
Together, they make a new memory of watercress.
Author Andrea Wang calls this moving, autobiographical story “both an apology and a love letter to my parents.” It’s a bittersweet, delicate look at how sharing the difficult parts of our histories can create powerful new moments of family history, and help connect us to our roots.
Jason Chin’s illustrations move between China and the American Midwest and were created with a mixture of traditional Chinese brushes and western media. The dreamy, nostalgic color palette brings this beautiful story to life.
An endnote from the author describes her personal connection to the story, and an illustrator’s note touches on both the process of the painting, and the emotional meaning brought to the work.
New England Book Award Winner
A New York Times Best Children’s Book of the Year
A Wall Street Journal Best Children's Book of the Year
A Boston Globe Best Children's Book of the Year
A Washington Post Best Children's Book of the Year
A Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Book
Winner of the Cybils Award
An SCBWI Crystal Kite Award Winner
A New York Public Library Best Book of the Year
A Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year
An ALSC Notable Children's Book
Named a best book of the year by Publishers Weekly, BookPage, School Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Lunch, Shelf Awareness , and more!
A CBC/NCSS Notable Social Studies Trade Book
An NPR 'Book We Love!'
A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection!
Drip. Sip. Pour me a cup. Water is water unless...it heats up.
Whirl. Swirl. Watch it curl by. Steam is steam unless...it cools high.
This spare, poetic picture book follows a group of kids as they move through all the different phases of the water cycle. From rain to fog to snow to mist, talented author Miranda Paul and the always remarkable Jason Chin (Redwoods, Coral Reefs, Island, Gravity) combine to create a beautiful and informative journey in this innovative nonfiction picture book that will leave you thirsty for more.
A Boston Globe - Horn Book Honor Recipient
An NSTA Outstanding Science Trade Book for Students
A Capitol Choices Noteworthy Title
A soon-to-be big sister and her parents prepare for the arrival of a new baby in the family. Alternating panels depict what the family is experiencing in tandem with how the baby is growing, spanning everything from receiving the news about the new baby to the excitement of its arrival.
In this pregnancy book unlike any other one out there, watch what's actually happening through meticulously detailed, actual size illustrations, perfectly paired with a lyrical yet informative text, and culminating in a warm, joyful birth scene.
Complete with backmatter that includes an elaboration on pregnancy, a list of amazing things babies can do before they're born, and more, Miranda Paul and Caldecott Medalist Jason Chin deliver another spectacular nonfiction picture book.
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year
A Horn Book Best Book of the Year
A Bank Street Best Book of the Year - Outstanding Merit
Rivers wind through earth, cutting down and eroding the soil for millions of years, creating a cavity in the ground 277 miles long, 18 miles wide, and more than a mile deep known as the Grand Canyon.
Home to an astonishing variety of plants and animals that have lived and evolved within its walls for millennia, the Grand Canyon is much more than just a hole in the ground. Follow a father and daughter as they make their way through the cavernous wonder, discovering life both present and past.
Weave in and out of time as perfectly placed die cuts show you that a fossil today was a creature much long ago, perhaps in a completely different environment. Complete with a spectacular double gatefold, an intricate map and extensive back matter.
In Your Place in the Universe, Jason Chin zoomed outward, from our planet, solar system, and galaxy to the outer reaches of the observable universe. Now, Chin reverses course, zooming in past our skin to our cells, molecules, and atoms, all the way down to particles so small we can’t yet even measure them.
Like its companion, The Universe in You is a mind-boggling adventure that makes complex science accessible and enjoyable to readers of any age.
Impeccably researched, wholly engrossing, and with extensive backmatter for additional learning, The Universe in You is another knockout from the award-winning creator of Redwoods, Grand Canyon, and other distinguished works of nonfiction for young readers.
An American Library Association Notable Children's Book
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year
A Horn Book Fanfare Title
A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year
A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection
Winner of the Cook Prize!
Most eight-year-olds are about five times as tall as this book . . . but only half as tall as an ostrich, which is half as tall as a giraffe . . . twenty times smaller than a California Redwood! How do they compare to the tallest buildings? To Mt. Everest? To stars, galaxy clusters, and . . . the universe?
Jason Chin, the award-winning author and illustrator of Grand Canyon has once again found a way to make a complex subject--size, scale and almost unimaginable distance--accessible and understandable to readers of all ages. Meticulously researched and featuring the highly detailed artwork for which he is renowned, this is How Much is a Million for the new millenium, sure to be an immediate hit with kids looking for an engaging way to delve into perspective, astronomy, and astrophysics. Curious readers will love the extensive supplementary material included in the back of the back of the book
An American Library Association Notable Children’s Book
A New England Book Award Finalist
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year
A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year
A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection
A Horn Book Fanfare Best Book of the Year
A Bank Street Best Children's Book of the Year!
A picnic, a beach, a pie cut into pieces and shared with good friends.
Pie is for sharing.
It starts off round, and you can slice it into as many pieces as you want. What else can be shared? A ball, of course. A tree? What about time?
Through the course of one memorable Fourth of July picnic, Stephanie Ledyard and Jason Chin take young readers through the ups and downs of sharing in this lovely picture book.
Jason Chin's Redwoods tells the story of a boy who discovers a book about redwoods and finds himself in their midst as he turns the pages.
An ordinary train ride becomes and extraordinary trip to the great ancient forests.
A subway trip is transformed when a young boy happens upon a book about redwood forests. As he reads the information unfolds, and with each new bit of knowledge, he travels--all the way to California to climb into the Redwood canopy. Crammed with interesting and accurate information about these great natural wonders, Jason Chin's first book is innovative nonfiction set within a strong and beautiful picture storybook. Chin's approach makes Redwoods a must-have common core tool for teachers and librarians introducing scientific principals to young students.
Charles Darwin first visited the Galápagos Islands almost 200 years ago, only to discover a land filled with plants and animals that could not be found anywhere else on earth. How did they come to inhabit the island? How long will they remain?
Thoroughly researched and filled with intricate and beautiful paintings, this extraordinary book by Award-winning author and artist Jason Chin is an epic saga of the life of an island—born of fire, rising to greatness, its decline, and finally the emergence of life on new islands. Chin's approach makes this book a must-have common core tool for teachers and librarians introducing scientific principals to young students.
Island is one of Kirkus Reviews' Best Children's Books of 2012
Read and find out about where polar bears live in this colorfully illustrated nonfiction picture book.
The Arctic might be a bit too chilly for humans, but it's the perfect home for polar bears. But the earth is getting warmer and the ice is melting. Where will the polar bears live? How can we help protect their home?
This is a clear and appealing science book for early elementary age kids, both at home and in the classroom. It's a Level 2 Let's-Read-and-Find-Out, which means the book explores more challenging concepts for children in the primary grades. The 100+ titles in this leading nonfiction series are:
- hands-on and visual
- acclaimed and trusted
- great for classrooms
Top 10 reasons to love LRFOs:
- Entertain and educate at the same time
- Have appealing, child-centered topics
- Developmentally appropriate for emerging readers
- Focused; answering questions instead of using survey approach
- Employ engaging picture book quality illustrations
- Use simple charts and graphics to improve visual literacy skills
- Feature hands-on activities to engage young scientists
- Meet national science education standards
- Written/illustrated by award-winning authors/illustrators & vetted by an expert in the field
- Over 130 titles in print, meeting a wide range of kids' scientific interests
Books in this series support the Common Core Learning Standards, Next Generation Science Standards, and the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) standards. Let's-Read-and-Find-Out is the winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science/Subaru Science Books & Films Prize for Outstanding Science Series.
During an ordinary visit to the library, a girl pulls a not-so-ordinary book from the shelves. As she turns the pages in this book about coral reefs, the city around her slips away and she finds herself surrounded by the coral cities of the sea and the mysterious plants and animals that live, hunt, and hide there.
Chin's approach makes this book a must-have common core tool for teachers and librarians introducing scientific principals to young students.