R. J. Palacio

Raquel Jaramillo Palacio (born July 13, 1963) is an American author and graphic designer.

She was a recipient of the Christopher Award for Wonder in 2013, and the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children's Book Award in 2014.

Wonder was on The New York Times Best Seller list and was also on the Texas Bluebonnet Award master list.

Wonder was the winner of the 2014 Maine Student Book Award, Vermont's Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children's Book Award, the 2015 Mark Twain Award, Hawaii's 2015 Nene Award, the 2015 Young Hoosier Book Award, and the Junior Young Reader's Choice Award for 2015.

In Illinois, it won both the Bluestem and Caudill Awards in 2014.

She is the author of several novels for children, including the best-selling Wonder, which was adapted into a 2017 film starring Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson.

R.J began her writing career as an illustrator, designing book covers for Paul Auster, Thomas Pynchon and others.

During the course of her career she designed many hundreds of book covers, covering both fiction and non-fiction books.

She also illustrated several children's books that she wrote herself.

For the first two decades of her career, she wrote books at night after her day job as a designer.

She illustrated her early books which were board books for children, published under the name Raquel Jaramillo.

In 2021, Random House announced that her new novel Pony would have a first printing of 500,000 copies.

It is her first novel not featuring the characters from the Wonder universe.

Born in New York City as the daughter of Colombian immigrants, Palacio attended Manhattan's High School of Art & Design and majored in designing at the Parsons School of Design.

She spent a year at the American University of Paris, travelling widely throughout Europe, before returning to New York.

She currently lives in North Carolina together with her husband Russell Gordon, an executive art director at Simon and Schuster Children's Books, and their two sons Caleb and Joseph.