Johanna Hurwitz is an award-winning author of more than sixty children's books. She has sold millions of books in many different languages.

Hurwitz graduated from Queens College, New York

Queens College, City University of New York

Queens College, located in Flushing, Queens, New York City, is one of the senior colleges of the City University of New York. It is also the fifth oldest of the City University's twenty-three institutions of higher learning. The college's seventy seven acre campus is located in the heart of the...

 with a degree in English and Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 with a master's in library science.

After many years working as a librarian, Hurwitz wrote her first book, Busybody Nora, in 1976, one of the first in the chapter book

Chapter book

A chapter book is a story book intended for intermediate readers, generally age 7-10. Unlike picture books for younger readers, a chapter book tells the story primarily through prose, rather than pictures. Unlike books for older readers, chapter books contain plentiful illustrations...

s genre for transitioning young readers from shorter stories to novels. "Busybody Nora" had taken 17 times for publishing companies to publish the book. Fortunately, Ravenstone Press was pleased to publish the book after three months Johanna Hurwitz had submitted the story. Her books include biographies for children of Anne Frank

Anne Frank

Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank is one of the most renowned and most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Acknowledged for the quality of her writing, her diary has become one of the world's most widely read books, and has been the basis for several plays and films.Born in the city of Frankfurt...

, Astrid Lindgren

Astrid Lindgren

Astrid Anna Emilia Lindgren , 14 November 1907 – 28 January 2002) was a Swedish author and screenwriter who is the world's 25th most translated author and has sold roughly 145 million copies worldwide...

, Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the United States of America to receive worldwide acclaim...

, and Helen Keller

Helen Keller

Helen Adams Keller was an American author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree....

. Her 1999 book, The Just Desserts Club, combined related short stories with recipes.

Hurwitz is the aunt of Garance Franke-Ruta

Garance Franke-Ruta

Garance Franke-Ruta is the politics editor of The Atlantic Online. Previously she was a national web politics editor for the Washington Post and a blogger for its WhoRunsGov site, a senior editor at the American Prospect and a senior writer at the Washington City Paper, D.C.'s alternative weekly...

 and Ted Frank

Ted Frank

Theodore H. Frank is an American lawyer, legal writer and blogger, based in Washington, D.C.. He is the founder and president of the Center for Class Action Fairness , established in 2009...

.