Strange Birds of Flannery O'Connor: A Life

Description: "I intend to stand firm and let the peacocks multiply, for I am sure that, in the end, the last word will be theirs."-- Flannery O'Connor.

Brief description: Amy Alznauer's writing has won the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction and the Christopher Award. She is also the editor of the facsimile edition of Mistaken Identity by Flannery O'Connor. Amy teaches mathematics at Northwestern University and lives and writes in Chicago with her husband, two children, a dog and her puppies, a female parakeet named Louis (whose identity was at first mistaken!), and an occasional brood of chicks. Find Amy and her children's books at www.amyalz.com.

Review Quotes: A New York Times Best Children's Book of 2020
Nominated for a 2021 Ezra Jack Keats Illustrator Award
Featured in 2021 Society of Illustrators Original Art Exhibition
A 2022 Book All Young Georgians Should Read
A 2020 Eureka! Nonfiction Children's Book Honor Award Recipient

"Like O'Connor, this gangly art object of a book tracing her first forays as a writer to an outsize fascination with the chickens in her childhood backyard is a 'strange bird, ' in the most wondrous of ways. 'There was something about strangeness, ' a young O'Connor realized after her trained bantam drew fame, 'that made people sit up and look.' Alznauer pairs a grounded, authentic vernacular with a lyricism that takes flight, while Zhu's depiction of odd human proportions against brilliant brushstroke plumage stuns."-- "The New York Times"