Saturday Afternoon with Author Mary Kay Carson

Before It Was a Hurricane starts at the peak of the action-the chaos and power of a hurricane at full strength-before stepping backward through time. Follow its four-thousand-mile journey from a hot desert breeze to the most destructive storm on Earth.

Mary Kay Carson is the author of more than sixty books for young people about wildlife, space, weather, nature, science, and history. After studying biology in college, and a stint in the Peace Corps, she began her thirty-year writing career working on the classroom magazine SuperScience at Scholastic in New York City. Her works encompass a wide range of juvenile genres, from nonfiction to picture books as well as historical fiction chapter books. Carson’s books have received more than a dozen starred reviews, as well as multiple awards, including the 2023 Giverny Award for Best Children’s Science Picture Book for The River That Wolves Moved and the 2019 AAAS Prize for Excellence in Science Books for Alexander Graham Bell for Kids. She partnered with her husband, photographer-videographer Tom Uhlman, to write and photo-illustrate seven titles in the acclaimed Scientists in the Field series, including Urban Coyotes, a 2025 NCTE Orbis Pictus Recommended Book; The Tornado Scientist, a State Library of Ohio Choose To Read Ohio title for 2021-22; and The Bat Scientists, an American Library Association 2011 Notable Children's Book for Middle Readers. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, in a century-old house surrounded by urban greenspace, deer, hawks, woodchucks, and songbirds. www.marykaycarson.com

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