When you get older and become a parent, your perspective shifts you start thinking about the people who came before you and what made them the way they are. Everything was still very black-and-white to me then: there were heroes and villains of my life story. “I realized that I wasn’t emotionally ready if you’re going to truly write a memoir, you can’t cherry-pick memories and events to pacify those in your life.

“Every time I sat down to write it, I hesitated, because I feared what people would think about what I was writing,” Krosoczka says. It was around this time, while he was still exclusively writing picture books, that he started thinking about sharing his own story. Krosoczka’s first book, Good Night, Monkey Boy, was published in 2001 by Random House, when he was 23 years old. Krosoczka’s graphic memoir, Hey, Kiddo (Graphix, Oct.), recounts his childhood and adolescence in Worcester, Mass., where he was raised by his colorful grandparents while his mother battled a heroin addiction (his father’s identity was a mystery to him).

Krosoczka’s next book is solidly a young adult offering-and a deeply personal story. In a significant departure from his 17 years of picture book and middle grade projects, including Punk Farm, the Lunch Lady graphic novel series, and the Platypus Police Squad chapter book series, author-illustrator Jarrett J.

Hey kiddo jarrett krosoczka