Lucky Platt creates children's picture books, life size bear paintings, crankies, mixed media animations, relief prints, paper sculptures and more delights in her lakeside home studio in Burnham, Maine, where she lives with her husband Jim Macdonald, a master woodworker, luthier and marquetry artist. Lucky and Jim also work collaboratively as Bunkhouse Studio.

Lucky’s debut picture book, Imagine a Wolf (Page Street Kids 2021) was a 2022 Maine Literary Awards Finalist in Children’s, a 2022 Ezra Jack Keats Award Finalist in New Writers, a 2021 New England Book Award Finalist, and has been translated into Korean. She is currently working on several picture books and an illustrated middle grade/young YA novel. Her stories explore themes of resilience, healing, positive self expression and inclusion, and are often illustrated in traditional art mediums such as oil paint, markers, gouache, graphite, paper sculpture, drypoint, pyrography and colored pencil.

Lucky has presented narrative art and writing workshops and artist talks for children and adults, most recently through Island Readers & Writers, University of Southern Maine, Farnsworth Art Museum, Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, Maine Media Workshops & College, Waterfall Arts, Waterville Creates, and many libraries, schools and indie bookshops. Lucky is a grateful recipient of three Maine Arts Commission Project Grants, one in 2016 for a curatorial project, another in 2020 for the development of her website and a 2022 literary arts grant to support a visiting author/illustrator program at Unity Public Library.

In 2024 and 2025, Lucky was honored to work with seventh and eighth graders from the Vinalhaven School and the Nobleboro Central School through Arts@theIntersection , an artist-facilitated program offered by the Farnsworth Art Museum. She is a regular contributor to Maine Home + Design Magazine Showcase. She is also the Artist-in-Residence for her rural town library, Unity Public Library (UPL), where she helped write a successful 2023-4 organizational grant from the Maine Arts Commission supporting the library’s Children’s Storyteller Series. In collaboration with Illustration Institute, the UPL Children’s Storyteller Series brings award-winning children’s book creators to western Waldo County for readings, book talks and art activities, as well as Storyteller Suppers with visiting creators and library community members, hosted by Lucky and her husband.

Lucky grew up in northeast PA and studied writing, painting, drawing and printmaking at Vassar College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Complutense City University of Madrid and with the NYC-based painter Ophrah Shemesh.. She is always learning and enriching her craft, and has participated in workshops with Maine Women Writers’ Collection, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, The Arts Students League of New York, Farnsworth Art Museum, Society of Visual Storytelling, SCBWI, Highlights Foundation and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, among others. She is a proud member of Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, Maine Crafts Association, Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art.

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