Jon Agee

Jon Agee (born 1960) is an American children's book writer and illustrator whose work centers around wordplay. Since 1981, he has published more than 31 books.

Early life and education Agee was born in Nyack, New York in 1960. He attended Cooper Union School of Art and graduated with a BFA degree.

In the 1990s, he wrote two musicals for children for the Tada! theater company,

He has written cartoons for The New Yorker.

Agee has published several books of palindromes and word play such as anagrams and oxymorons. He became interested in them after a friend started writing them. "I liked the way absurdity and logic were intertwined," Agee said. The New York Times wrote that "it would be a near miss, if not a minor catastrophe, not to take the calculated risk of treating the whole family to this instant classic." He also won in 2021. He enjoys crossword puzzles. In 2003, New York Times puzzle editor Will Shortz wrote that Agee had thanked him for including his name in a Friday crossword and joked that "he would not be satisfied until his name appeared in a Monday puzzle, the easiest of the week, where every answer is supposed to be familiar to most solvers. Only then would he know that he had truly arrived."

List of works Picture books

If Snow Falls (1982) Dmitri the Astronaut (1996) So Many Dynamos!: And Other Palindromes (1994) Dee Lillegard, Sitting in My Box (1989) Tor Seidler, Mean Margaret (1997) Erica Silverman, The Halloween House (1998) William Steig, Potch & Polly (2002)