Aruna Lepore

Aruna never thought that her passive dream of writing would become a passion and a reality. She grew up in Trinidad in the Caribbean, and, although now an American author and illustrator, her style reflects her Caribbean influences...bright colors, vibrant music and the cultural values she learnt at home.

She is the daughter of entrepreneurs, so it's no wonder that she earned her MBA rather than a degree in the Arts. However, a hint that there was an artist under the surface was the Minor in Art that she pursued during her undergraduate studies at the University of Miami in 1998. Still, she was loyal to the decades-old family business, heading to the University of Florida for an MBA in 2003. It was years later that she would marry an American, move to the U.S. and start a family.

Motherhood became her new lifestyle, and she treated it with all the compassion and tenderness that her own mother showed her. She hung up her corporate hat, for the most part, and became a happy stay-at-home mother.

Being in another country, away from her mother for many months at a time, had its emotional challenges. So Aruna put pen to paper every Mother's Day and birthday to express her feelings, and these became her long distance gifts to her mother. It was the passion with which she wrote these short stories and poems that set Aruna onto a writing path.

Her love for telling her own children stories, her passion for writing and for painting, the values instilled in her, and cultural influences all combined to help Aruna create her first children's book, Peanut the Penguin.