Do you get hangry? Do you know any children who get hangry and don’t understand what’s going on? Then this book is perfect for you!

Katherine Pryor is an award-winning children’s book author and good food advocate. She grew up in California and Arizona before moving to Seattle to study food and farming. Her books are widely used in school garden curriculum, nutrition education, and anti-hunger initiatives and have been recognized by the Whole Kids Foundation Book Club, Ag in the Classroom, and the American Horticultural Society. Katherine’s previous titles include Home Is Calling—winner of the SCBWI Charlotte and Wilbur Award, Growing Good Kids Book Award, and NCTE Notable Children’s Book in the Language Arts Award—as well as Zora’s Zucchini, Bea’s Bees, and Sylvia’s Spinach. In addition to writing, Katherine has worked to create better food choices at institutions, large corporations, and food banks. She lives in Northern California with her husband and two voracious kids. You can learn more about her at her website or follow her on Instagram or BlueSky.

ATTACK OF THE HANGRIES is an informational picture book written with a sense of humor. What if the hangries are just waiting to attack like little gremlins hiding around the corner? I know it certainly feels that way! I didn’t even realize how the hangries would affect me until one Friday night when I went to dinner with a friend at a popular local restaurant (known for its LONG waits) and she pulled a snack out of her purse for me. Katherine uses a kid-friendly approach to explain the science and nutrition behind what’s actually going on, but oh man. Brace yourself for the laughs! This is probably the funniest informational picture book I’ve ever seen AND I still managed to learn a lot!

Welcome Katherine!

Me:  Can you talk a little bit about yourself and about your writing journey up to this point?  When did you start writing picture books? How did that lead to where you are now as the author of this book?

Katherine: I’ve loved writing since I was a kid, and even tried to make it as a novelist in my twenties. When I got tired of waiting tables and bartending to support my writing habit, I went to grad school, found a job I loved, and began living a fairly grown-up life. But I missed writing, and started carving out time to write before work in the morning.

I got the idea for my first picture book while listening to a parent talk about their daughter on a Farm to School lobby day in my state capital. I ended up taking an evening class on writing for children and young adults at my local community college, and workshopped the draft through that. Once I had the draft, I had the absolutely unheard-of, bizarre good luck of learning that a personal friend, Philip Lee—the founder of Lee & Low Books—was starting a new publishing house and was actively looking for a picture book about school gardens, aka, exactly the book I had written. How did this happen? Who knows? But luck is luck, and he was both my mentor and editor for my first two books.

When I had twins in 2017, suddenly I was surrounded by board books and picture books, and that combined with extreme sleep deprivation somehow led me on a bit of a creative streak that resulted in eight more books celebrating food, gardens, and nature. I did a book with my friend Ellie Peterson, who introduced me to her agent, Adria Goetz, and that helped me work with larger publishing houses like Hachette, but I still love working with smaller, family-owned publishers like Readers to Eaters and Schiffer Kids.

Me: I love the hilarious angle you’ve taken in your writing to explain the Hangries. What gave you the idea for this story?

Katherine: I have a definite tendency to get hangry when I don’t eat, and years ago, someone mentioned that she pictured the hangries as little monsters. I had been walking around with this image in my mind, hoping I could figure out a story for it, when I read an article about why humans get hangry. For some people, low blood glucose levels trigger the release of the fight-or-flight hormones adrenaline and cortisol. As I was driving to a doctor’s appointment, I literally had the pieces of the story come together in my head and wrote the first draft on my phone in a medical center parking lot.

Me: I love the way you broke down the nutritional science here so simply, and you have many amazing sidebars as well. Can you tell us a bit about your research process? How long did it take you to research all the different facts and tidbits that went into this story?

Katherine: The research took much longer than the writing! I have a professional background in food and farming, but it’s more on the production and procurement side of things. Luckily, I have several friends with nutrition backgrounds, so in addition to reading every scientific article I could find on the subject, I interviewed my friends about what kinds of food help us stay full longer, and had two friends review and comment on the manuscript and back matter.

When writing drafts of the story, I opted not to explain too much and just focused on getting words down. I think I literally left asterisks next to certain words knowing that I could research them later. Once I had a rough draft of the whole thing, I started trying to figure out how to distill information on things like hormones into kid-friendly language.

The back matter actually took much longer to write than the book itself. My editor, Peggy Schaefer, really pushed me to include a lot of information about the human digestive process and also wanted to include some information about the vagus nerve, which I knew nothing about. I read several books on human digestion to be able to distill it down to one page. (And got to write the first toilet joke of my career!) I had multiple conversations with my nutritionist friends about the foods I recommend, and learned a ton. Some of the random facts I learned were so much fun that we had to include them. Did you know that humans create 4-6 cups of saliva every day? I didn’t until I was researching this book.

Me: LOL! I didn’t know that actually. This is such a unique story with an incredibly funny angle for informational writing. Can you talk about the marketing of it? Did you write it with a market in mind? Or did you just write it for fun and it found a home? How did it come to be published with Worthy Kids/Hachette?

Katherine:  The publication journey was weirdly simple. I had loved working with Peggy and the team at Worthy Kids/Hachette on my 2023 picture book Home is Calling: The Journey of the Monarch Butterfly, so my agent sent them an exclusive early look at Attack of the Hangries. Peggy replied immediately that she wanted it, making it the easiest sale of my career! It was nice to work with an editor I already knew and trusted, and she knew she could trust me to make the necessary revision to get the manuscript publication-ready.

I rarely write with a market in mind—I tend to just write whatever I’m interested in and then see if I can find a market for it. (The one exception to this is my Hello! board book series, where I modeled all the books on the first book in the series.)  However, the fact that so many of my books deal with food and gardens did make this book easy to market to those groups. I’ve been lucky to build up a roster of amazing school garden and nutrition education contacts, and when the book came out, I knew exactly who to send it to. I think that made the publisher feel more sure of my ability to market the book.

And we were lucky I did have that roster, because two months before the book came out (ie, the most important phase in selling a book) the marketing lead for the book left Hachette unexpectedly and sent the rest of the team scrambling to figure out what to do. Luckily, my friends and contacts came through, and helped me get the word out. I had heard stories of things like that happening, but it had never happened to me. It definitely hurt sales, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

Me: What is one thing that surprised you in writing this story?

Katherine: One delightful surprise is how much it’s helped my conversations around food with my own kids. I have 8-year-old twins who definitely inherited my hangry gene, but now instead of just pestering them to eat, I can say, “What’s going to happen if you don’t eat lunch?” Then they sort of roll their eyes and say, “We know, we know—the Hangries might get us!” But then they eat!

Me: The illustrations by Thiago Buzzy are wonderful.  There are so many hilarious little things going on within each page. Were there any illustration surprises for you?  Any favorites?

Katherine: I truly love all of the art, but one of my favorite pages features an illustration of a Hangry driving a car through a kid’s bloodstream. When he submitted that page, my editor emailed me to ask, “Just how realistic does this art need to be…?” because she was worried it might not seem scientifically realistic enough with that scene. But we both decided that it added so much fun and humor that we had to keep it. He brought so much life and whimsy to what could have been a dry subject.

I was also really grateful that he and the art director took my requests and suggestions seriously. I wanted the art to show girls eating and enjoying food, because one of my big-dream goals with this book is countering girls’ negative self-talk around food and eating from a young age. I hate that eating disorders are rising, rather than falling, and this is my tiny contribution in trying to do something about it. Anyway, some early sketches showed the boy on the cover (who looks a lot like I imagine Thiago looked as a kid!) as the primary character. I asked to make sure girls were also shown eating, and he added another character with her own story arc. I’m glad we got to keep kid-Thiago while also making sure more of our readers could see themselves in this book.

Me: Wow! I love that! Any advice for other aspiring picture book writers and/or illustrators?

Katherine: I think some people are surprised by how hard it is to break into this market, but I like to remind people that it’s an art form as well as a business. A fine artist or a musician wouldn’t expect to go professional without first learning their craft and putting in a lot of practice hours. Writing and illustrating children’s literature is no different. I had a bizarrely easy introduction to the business in that my first picture book was published relatively quickly, but I then had to spend several years learning the craft to get my other books published. I’m over a decade into this business and I still don’t know which ideas will sell and which won’t.

My advice is: try to write and draw as much as possible for fun, without putting too much pressure on publication right away. You’ll get better at your craft while enjoying the creative process more. Kids can tell when you have fun writing a book!

That is great advice Katherine. Thank you so much for stopping by my blog today.

Dear readers, this book published in September. It’s probably one of the funniest informational picture books I’ve ever seen and perfectly fills a hole in the market for books like this. Trust me when I say, you won’t want to miss it.