John Hare has been illustrating educational books for years. In 2019 he published his first trade book, Field Trip to the Moon (Margaret Ferguson/Holiday House) which garnered seven international rights sales before being published in the U.S. It was nominated for the Deutscher Jugendliteratur Prize in 2020 and for the Anderson Prize from Germany and Italy in 2020. Field Trip to the Ocean Deep followed in Fall 2020. He is busy writing and illustrating three more books under contract.

John spent his youth in Kansas drawing comic strips about snakes, making spoof yearbooks to entertain his friends and writing stories about a crime-fighting crocodile. John now lives in Gladstone, Missouri, where he is fortunate to work from his home studio when he’s not corralling kids and tending to the biological needs of small animals.