About Lindsay

The formal version

Lindsay H. Metcalf is a former journalist who writes nonfiction and poetry for young people. She is a co-editor of and contributor to the Social Justice Literature and Green Earth Book Award-winning young activist poetry anthologies No Voice Too Small and No World Too Big, and the summer 2026 installment, No Brain the Same: Neurodivergent Young Activists Shaping Our Future. Three of Lindsay’s picture books were named Junior Library Guild selections: Tomatoes on Trial; Outdoor Farm, Indoor Farm; and Farmers Unite!, also a Bank Street Best Book of 2020. Her 2020 debut, the picture book biography Beatrix Potter, Scientist, won the Friends of American Writers Young People’s Literature Award. In February 2026, she will release her young adult debut, Footeprint: Eunice Newton Foote at the Dawn of Climate Science and Women’s Rights, a biography-in-verse about a nineteenth-century scientist and suffragist who discovered carbon dioxide’s warming properties. Lindsay began her writing career as a reporter, editor, and columnist for The Kansas City Star and other news outlets. She lives in north-central Kansas with her husband, two sons, and a matching pair of Cavalier King Charles lapdogs. Learn more at lindsayhmetcalf.com and @lindsayhmetcalf on social media.

Click here for a short biography suitable for programs.

Photo by Anna Jackson
Photo by Anna Jackson

The personal version

I grew up on a Kansas farm, where I developed a curiosity about nature. I loved to follow my golden retriever to the creek and hunt for tree stumps gnawed by beavers, look for deer tracks, and wonder at the ripples made by pebbles I’d skipped. I also loved to ride the combine with my dad. (Chopping weeds out of the soybean fields? That was another story.)

I wanted to read all the time as a young child, so in order to get the chores done, my parents bought me a lot of books on tape. I can still hear the music for the page turns on Roger Hargreaves’ “Little Miss” stories. I memorized and recited nursery rhymes, and I loved to pretend. That may explain why one of the first stories I wrote as a kid featured a smitten, waltzing ostrich.

After high school and college, I flew the coop for a career in the city. Then I became a mom and decided to leave my job as a newspaper reporter to stay home with my kids. I rekindled my love of children’s books when I realized my two rambunctious little boys would sit still for a good story.

That gave me my mission: to tell stories that empower children and encourage them to care for the world and all its creatures. I write books for young people from my home a few miles from the farm where I grew up.

Little Lindsay with sunburnt cheeks and a golden retriever named Penny

I don’t write all the time. I also like to:

  • Play COW with my kids, and often lose. Fact: Even at 5’9”, I am not good at basketball.
  • Snuggle with my Cavalier King Charles, Ozzy (who is unaware of his breed’s connection to the British monarchy), and my cats, Gertie and Meeko.
  • Act as sous chef—veggie chopper, sauce taster, ingredient getter, dish washer—to the main chef of the house, my husband.
  • Build things out of wood, such as a lofted fort bed I once built for my youngest son.
  • Tickle the ivories on my heirloom baby grand piano and learn ukulele.
  • Plant a garden and neglect it by accident. Fact: Growing up on a farm did not give me a green thumb.
  • Help on my parents’ farm by hauling irrigation pipe in the summer or taming barn kitties. Fact: Not everyone would define the latter as “helping.”
  • Watch birds from my porch swing.
  • Connect with others who love to read and write. (Contact me!)

Want to hear some bad poetry I wrote as a kid? Watch this video:

Little Lindsay with sunburnt cheeks and a golden retriever named Penny

Interviews

I don’t write all the time. I also like to:

  • Play COW with my kids, and often lose. Fact: Even at 5’9”, I am not good at basketball.
  • Snuggle with my Cavalier King Charles, Ozzy (who is unaware of his breed’s connection to the British monarchy), and my cats, Gertie and Meeko.
  • Act as sous chef—veggie chopper, sauce taster, ingredient getter, dish washer—to the main chef of the house, my husband.
  • Build things out of wood, such as a lofted fort bed I once built for my youngest son.
  • Tickle the ivories on my heirloom baby grand piano and learn ukulele.
  • Plant a garden and neglect it by accident. Fact: Growing up on a farm did not give me a green thumb.
  • Help on my parents’ farm by hauling irrigation pipe in the summer or taming barn kitties. Fact: Not everyone would define the latter as “helping.”
  • Watch birds from my porch swing.
  • Connect with others who love to read and write. (Contact me!)

Want to hear some bad poetry I wrote as a kid? Watch this video:

Interviews