Lauren A. Mills

Lauren A. Mills is an author and illustrator whose children's books combine visual storytelling with folklore, history, and close attention to family life. Minna’s Patchwork Coat expands the Appalachian world of her earlier picture book The Rag Coat into an illustrated middle-grade novel. Minna loses her coal-miner father and cannot afford a winter coat, so neighbors assemble one from fabric scraps carrying their own family memories. The 2015 Little, Brown Books for Young Readers edition includes fifty pencil illustrations by Mills alongside her text. Mills also created The Goblin Baby and illustrated retellings of Thumbelina, Tatterhood, and other traditional tales. The later Minna book returns to a character Mills introduced in 1991, and Little, Brown issued it as twentieth-century American historical fiction for young readers. Minna’s Patchwork Coat therefore connects Mills's roles as novelist, picture-book creator, and illustrator through one sustained Appalachian story.