Jodi Parry Belknap was educated at the Happy Valley School in Ojai, California, and at Barnard College in New York City, which she attended on a Proctor & Gamble scholarship, earning an A.B. in English and writing.

After graduation she taught elementary school for five years, taking the courses required for a California lifetime teaching credential in summers at Stanford and the University of California. Her outstanding classroom skills were recognized by the University of California at Hayward which certified her as a Master Teacher and requested that she train student teachers in her classroom.

After coming to Hawaii Ms. Belknap worked for more than two decades as a photojournalist covering the Hawaiian Islands and Pacific Basin countries, primarily as Pacific Bureau Chief for Official Airline Guides, a Dun & Bradstreet-owned publisher of periodicals serving the travel industry in North America. Her assignments for OAG and many other publications took her to destinations throughout the Pacific Basin, including Japan, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, French Polynesia, Australia, New Zealand, Western Samoa, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, the Philippines, Mexico and Guatemala. During this period she also edited books and periodicals for the University of Hawaii Press, Bishop Museum and other Hawaii-based publishers and served as consulting editor for Growing Up Books for Young Children, a series focusing on superbly illustrated multicultural classics including Issunboshi, Momotaro, Urashima Taro, Puapualenalena, and Kamapu'a'a, published by Island Heritage Ltd.

In the 1980s Ms. Belknap began a graduate program in Children's Theatre and playwriting at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, earning an M.A.in 1988. Seeds for children's books that would inspire performing arts with puppetry were planted during discussions with her then adviser, Tamara Montgomery, when they first considered creating an oversized book with cutout shadow puppets.

An accomplished text and visual editor, Ms. Belknap is the author of five non-fiction books including Kaanapali and Majesty, The Exceptional Trees of Hawaii, as well as a fantasy for young children, Felisa and the Magic Tikling Bird. Two original stories for children, How the Reef Fish of Hawaii Got Their Colors and Pueo, Kulia, and the Ki Ponds of Ko Olina, are included in the resort book Ko'olina, Place of Joy, by Rita Ariyoshi, which Ms. Belknap designed and published on behalf of Ko'olina Resort in 2002. The latter two stories reflect her deep interest in the host culture of Hawaii, and in the preservation of its remarkable traditions and mythology. Additionally, Ms. Belknap has authored hundreds of nonfiction art and travel features that have appeared in such publications as The Christian Science Monitor, Travel & Leisure and the San Francisco Chronicle. Today she writes occasional non-fiction features for magazines and also serves as editor for Westwater Books, a family-owned Colorado-based publisher of historic guides marketed to river runners in the West since 1969.

Find out more about her activities and services at www.belknappublishing.com.