Tony DiTerlizzi is a 54 year old American author and illustrator, best known for creating the Spiderwick Chronicles along with Holly Black.
Early life & Education[]
Tony was born in an artistic family in Los Angeles the year 1969, and was the first of three children. He grew up in south Florida, where he attended the South Fork High School. He went to college at the Florida School of the Arts and The Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale.
After Art School, he moved to New York with his wife Angela and began an illustration career for the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game. He also worked on the 1994 Planescape Campaign Setting and its supplements, and also illustrated many other storytelling games. He is also famous because he illustrated many cards for the trading card game Magic: The Gathering.
After illustrating books such as Dinosaur Summer from 1998 by Greg Bear, Tony started writing his own children's books. With publishing Jimmy Zangwow's Out-of-this-World Moon Pie Adventure (2000), Tony fulfilled a childhood dream of creating his own illustrated children's book. A year later, Ted , which features a father trying to communicate with his son through his imaginary friend, followed. Ted received the 2002 Zena Sutherland Award. After that, Tony re-illustrated Mary Howitt's classic poem The Spider and the Fly, and for that he was rewarded with the 2003 Caldecott Honor Medal.
Tony met Holly Black when she came to interview him for the role-playing games magazine d8. Soon they began working together. Together they created the Spiderwick Chronicles in an effort to bring the fantasy genre to younger readers. They sold it to Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers and to Nickelodeon Movies in 2002. In 2005, Arthur Spiderwick's Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You was published. In 2007, a sequel series, Beyond the Spiderwick Chronicles, was published in 2007 and continued to 2009. In 2008, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramount_Pictures Paramount Pictures] published a movie adaption of the Chronicles.
Note: Although Holly was the official author of Spiderwick, Tony helped with plot forming and wrote some sections, but ultimately he was the illustrator and Holly the writer.
Tony also published the sci-fi fantasy book trilogy WondLa, with the first part, The Search for WondLa, published in September 2010 and the second book, A Hero for WondLa, released in May 2012.
Tony lives with his wife Angela and his daughter, Sophia, in Armherst, Massachusetts.