Erin Bried

Erin Bried brings an editor's eye to practical nonfiction and founded Kazoo, a magazine created to encourage curiosity and confidence in young readers. How to Build a Fire gathers over a hundred practical lessons shared by grandfathers, from changing a tire and tying a necktie to writing a letter and giving a toast. Ballantine Books presents the collection as both a handbook and a record of lived experience, with instructions accompanied by stories and humor. Bried later carried that interest in useful, welcoming instruction into children's publishing. Her editorial background and the book's interview-based structure give the advice a human scale: each skill arrives through a person who learned it, practiced it, and chose to pass it on.