Dan McCauley

Dan McCauley is an educator and the author of the Thank You, World picture book series with Free Spirit Publishing. He is also developing a sports picture book series with Curiosity Unlocked, set to debut in fall 2027. He writes stories about gratitude, wonder, belonging, and the moments that help young people feel ready to meet the world.

Dan was raised in the Bronx by Little League coaches who bought him cleats, soccer teammates who became family, and a mother who painted his childhood ceilings red, gold, and orange. He learned early that love can take many forms. Those kinds of love would not only become how Dan made sense of the world, but eventually how he would write in it.

Dan wasn't known for being a big reader or strong writer growing up. He often struggled to keep up with his reading homework and school in general. Instead, Dan slowly discovered his need to write and make sense of the world in the back of his eighth-grade math notebook, where he secretly journaled and wrote poems while waiting for the school bell to ring to play baseball.

During the spring of eighth grade, a beloved coach and volunteer in Dan's Bronx Little League community passed away. Dan journaled and wrote a poem to make sense of the loss. Months later, he learned over his school's loudspeaker that a poem he had submitted to a contest had been selected for publication. The experience showed Dan that writing done in private could find its way to other people.

In high school, writing, education, and sports each became ways for Dan to imagine more possibilities for his life. Those worlds memorably crossed paths the day he left a preseason varsity baseball game to perform in the quarterfinals of a poetry slam.

In college, Dan continued performing spoken-word poetry, but his world got bigger. He volunteered in adult literacy classrooms and joined a graduate-level course in which Dan and other students led performing arts and writing workshops at a local jail. He saw firsthand how language could create connection and possibility.

The first twenty years of Dan's life informed how he wanted to spend the rest of it. This included keeping a promise to himself that he would do things the way he grew up in the world: in deep gratitude, and in deep love.

Dan brought that promise into the classroom — first as an English teacher in the same borough that raised him, and now as a learning specialist and educational therapist in Los Angeles. He has spent more than a decade working with students with learning differences and other vulnerable populations. His teaching is grounded in something he knows from experience: healthy struggle is valuable, and kids are at their best when you build from their strengths and let them own the process.

That promise is also what led Dan to write for kids.

The Thank You, World series is a collection of lyrical, kid-centered picture books that invite children and families to spend time outdoors, slow down, and notice how the beauty of the natural world can make them feel. Publishers Weekly has noted that the series "captures the beneficial qualities of mindful movement."

His upcoming sports series puts kids at the heart of the action and explores the dreams and special moments that families and communities share through sports.

Dan is currently exploring personal narrative and longer-form memoir work about his upbringing in the Bronx.

Whether writing about sports, the outdoors, or his own life, Dan writes with the belief that kids inherently have the strength and agency to meet big moments, the ability to discover and honor what is special to them, and the capacity to find their way through difficult times.

When he's not writing, Dan can often be found taking walks around his LA neighborhood or by the ocean with his wife, watching sports, or visiting New York to spend time with friends and family. In what he calls his favorite job ever, he spent more than ten years coaching sports and introducing New York City kids to the game he loves most: baseball.