Artie Bennett . . . who?!?

Artie Bennett is a jet-setter and bon vivant Shhh! He thinks he is. Let's start again. Artie Bennett is a rootin'-tootin', rip-snortin', two-fisted Stop!!! Enough already. . . . Artie Bennett is the executive copy editor for a children's book publisher and he writes a little on the side (but not the backside!).

He grew up in Brooklyn, New Yorkborn and fled, he likes to say—hightailing it to Georgia, where he matriculated at the University of, earning a journalism degree. He then went on to work for the local broadsheet, the Athens Banner-Herald, cheek by jowl with Kate Pierson of the B-52s, who was a paste-up artist there before her ship came in.

After seven years down south, he up and moved to a Galilean kibbutz, where he labored as the gardener's apprentice. "Good, honest toil," he calls it. He also put in his time in the kibbutz's banana orchard, so Harry Belafonte's "Day-o" ("It's six-foot, seven-foot, eight-foot bunch!") has a special resonance for him.

He came back stateside after nigh a year in Israel to a succession of (very) odd jobs, including cookware salesman, knishery counterman, and telephone solicitor for Poconos real estate. Then he found his way. And the rest, as they say, is history.

As a toddler, little Artie Bennett developed a fascination for language after "chewing on" the board-book version of Strunk and White's Elements of Style. See his "Claim to Fame" to learn more about his "checkered" past. To this day, he collects colorful and evocative words, such as pilgarlic ("a bald-headed man"), callipygian ("having a shapely buttocks"), and limacine ("sluglike"). Read more...