A Search for Safe Passage
Safe Passage is the first children’s book by author Frances Figart and the debut book-length work by illustrator Emma DuFort.
Title offers a dramatic narrative and exceptional educational content with additional nonfiction section.
Provides accessible educational lessons about animal habitat requirements, behavior, migration patterns, and roadway ecology problems and solutions developed in coordination with input from both international and local experts at Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Title’s roadway wildlife ecology message addresses a global issue with application and appeal to diverse markets across US and abroad.
Title includes a song with musical notation and a prompt to use accompanying online educational teaching materials.
This title is closely connected to Safe Passage: The I-40 Pigeon River Gorge Wildlife Crossing Project, the focus of a major new public education and infrastructure development campaign in Western North Carolina and East Tennessee.
Author Frances Figart grew up in eastern Kentucky where she learned to love living near wildlife. Always a writer and editor, she now directs the Creative Services department at Great Smoky Mountains Association and edits Smokies Life magazine, the premier benefit for GSMA members. She is the editor of the 2019 GSMA title, Back of Beyond: A Horace Kephart Biography, which won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award that same year. She authored a collection of her autobiographical essays, Seasons of Letting Go: Most of what I know about truly living I learned by helping someone die. A Search for Safe Passage is her first book for young readers. Frances Figart lives near Asheville, North Carolina.
Illustrator Emma DuFort hails from west Michigan and visited Great Smoky Mountains National Park frequently as a child. After graduating from Grand Valley State University with a degree in illustration, she returned to live and work in the Smokies. Starting out as a sales assistant in visitor centers run by Great Smoky Mountains Association, she soon became a publications specialist working with GSMA’s Creative Services department. Emma has also earned a naturalist certification from Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont. A Search for Safe Passage is the first book she has designed and illustrated. Emma DuFort lives near Gatlinburg, Tennessee.
