Court Crandall

I started with the premise that the last thing the world needs is another children’s book. What I did think would be valuable though, is a tool for parents. A tool that helped working mothers and busy fathers make the most of the time they get to spend with their children. Inspired by my son Chase, who had grown less enthusiastic about public displays of affection, I devised a series of creative hugs that made hugging fun again. I then set the hugs in a fictional town called Hugville and wrote a Dr. Seuss-like rhyme that explained how to perform each of them.

My hope was that kids would want to pick up Hugville every night because it was more interactive and involving than other books, and parents would want to do the same simply because it allowed them to spend more time hugging their children.

At the risk of sounding sanctimonious, I believe cuts in funding for arts and music programs at public schools coupled with the proliferation of things like video games has resulted in a generation of children with atrophied senses of imagination. This is particularly sad given that we are probably never as wonderfully open and purely creative as we are as children. So as an author, I feel a responsibility to not just entertain this young audience, but to inspire them with words and images that expand their view of the world and encourage them to create their own stories.

Court Crandall is the creative partner of Ground Zero Advertising, a Los Angeles-based ad agency whose clients include ESPN, Virgin Digital and the anti-smoking effort for the state of California. He lives in Manhattan Beach, California with his wife Denise, sons Chase and Zane and their dog Fenway.

When Court’s not following the Red Sox or coaching his children’s sports teams, he also acts as a professional screenwriter, having penned the DreamWorks comedy, Old School, and the independent feature, Perseverance. Any remaining free time is spent writing children’s books or lecturing his boys about how lucky they are to live in a place where you don’t have to shovel snow. Sometimes, for good measure, he also tells them how far he used to have to walk to school, even though it was really pretty close.