Jolene Gutiérrez grew up on a farm in northeastern Colorado, surrounded by animals, plants, and history. Now, she lives with her family and a variety of animals in a suburb of Denver, Colorado. She is an award-winning neurodivergent teacher librarian and has been working with neurodivergent learners at Denver Academy since 1995. She’s a wife of 25+ years and mama to two young adults, three dogs, two cats, and an ever-rotating variety of other rescue animals. Jolene is an active member of SCBWI and The Authors Guild, part of the KidLitCollective and Picture Book Gold groups, and a co-creator of #KidlitZombieWeek. Jolene is represented by agent Kaitlyn Sanchez of Bradford Literary. She’s a contributor to If I Could Choose a Best Day: Poems of Possibility (2025) and the author of Unbreakable: A Japanese American Family in an American Incarceration Camp (2026), Mamiachi and Me (2025), The Ofrenda That We Built (2024), Too Much! (2023), the Stars of Latin Pop series (2021), Bionic Beasts: Saving Animal Lives with Artificial Flippers, Legs, and Beaks (2020), and Mac and Cheese and the Personal Space Invader (2020).