About Rowan Merris
Rowan Merris is a writer, illustrator, and designer whose creative life has always lived at the intersection of imagery, language, and imagination. Before creating Crumbville™, Rowan spent years shaping the visual worlds of high-end fashion catalogs and editorial magazines, developing a cinematic eye for color, character, and storytelling that now infuses every page of the books. For well over a decade, Rowan has collected story seeds in every form, including notes on a phone, long lists of intriguing words, phrases overheard in cafés, character ideas scribbled in margins, and late-night voice memos filled with half-dreamed plot twists. Those fragments slowly grew into Crumbville™, a warm and whimsical town filled with humor, heart, and characters readers fall instantly in love with. Rowan writes the stories, illustrates the worlds, and designs each book in meticulous detail, bringing a fully unified vision to life. Drawn to themes of honesty, courage, integrity, kindness, and the quiet magic of everyday life, Rowan continues to craft new adventures for Pernicious, Mary Droppins, Sassy with a Z, and the ever-growing cast of Crumbville.
The Mission of Crumbville Press
Children deserve stories that take them seriously.
Stories that trust their curiosity, honor their intelligence, and invite them into worlds where imagination and meaning live side by side.
Crumbville is built to be that world.
Our mission is to create richly layered, beautifully crafted stories that spark wonder while encouraging thoughtful reading, emotional awareness, and moral courage. These are books that welcome young readers with warmth and humor, then reward them with depth. These stories are meant to be revisited, re-read, and rediscovered as readers grow.
For children, Crumbville offers adventure, mystery, and characters worth rooting for.
For parents, teachers, and librarians, it offers literature with substance: narratives that support discussion, empathy, and critical thinking without sacrificing joy or accessibility.
Above all, Crumbville exists to remind us that stories shape how we see the world. Even in the sweetest places, bravery, choice, and kindness matter. These stories are written for readers who are becoming themselves. And for the adults who guide them there, with the understanding that the right story, at the right moment, can stay with a reader for a lifetime.
