Ruth Sanderson grew up with a love for horses. She drew them constantly, and her first oil painting, at age fourteen, was a horse portrait.
Ruth has illustrated and retold many fairy tales and likes to feature horses in them whenever possible. Her book about a magical horse, The Golden Mare, the Firebird, and the Magic Ring, won the Texas Bluebonnet Award in 2003. She illustrated the first Black Stallion paperback covers and a number of chapter books about horses, most recently Summer Pony and Winter Pony by Jean Slaughter Doty.
Ruth and her daughter have two horses, an Appaloosa named Thor and a quarter horse named Gabriel. She lives with her family in Massachusetts.
To find out more about her adventures with horses and the research she did to create the illustrations in this book, visit her Web site, www.ruthsanderson.com.