Mo Willems is really tall. His is audience is very short. (Think knee-high or lower.) Willems is the guy who created the pigeon preschoolers love to deny (Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, etc.), the genius behind the now-famous story of a lime-green stuffed rabbit left behind in a Brooklyn laundromat one day by a little girl named Trixie.

He brings his act to Coral Gables on March 13.

Willems is a busy guy, with nine books coming out this year, and a live stage production of his second book opening at the Kennedy Center in May. It is titled Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Musical and the show-stopping number, with lyrics by Willems, is written entirely in the gibberish of an unintelligible 2-year-old. Few others can claim the phrase “Aggle Flaggle Klabble!” made their fortune.  

“This was going to be the year it was going to slow down, but I’m really excited by how busy I am,” Willems said from his home in rural Massachusetts. “I’m learning a lot of new stuff and doing things because I really want to do them, not because the market is driving me to do it.”  

In South Florida, he’ll focus on his newest releases: I Am Going! (Disney Book Group, $8.99), the 10th book about Gerald the Elephant (who looks something like the author if the author were more rotund and had loppy ears) and Piggie, his insouciant best friend. Two of the stories in this series have won the heodore Seuss Geisel Medal from the American Library Association, an award that recognizes excellence in books for new readers, named for the late Dr. Seuss. He’ll also introduce Cat the Cat (Balzer + Bray, $10.99), a new series aimed at pre-literate children. The books have simple vocabulary and a story line that is straightforward until the end, at which point Willems’ slightly Surreal sensibility takes over.

On successive pages in Cat the Cat, Who is That?, for instance, Cat meets Duck the duck,  Mouse the mouse, Fish the fish and then . . . well, you’ll just have to read the book yourself to find out.   

“The kids I have already read the book to, when I come to that moment of weirdness, they all really dig it,” Willems said.

Pigeon fans will have fun finding his cameo in both Cat books. “I have to include him,” Willems says of the turquoise-hued bird, “because he hates it when I make books that are not about him.”  

Willems began his career on Sesame Street, where we won six Emmy Awards. His first book, Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, won a Caldecott Honor, as did his second,  Knuffle Bunny, and its sequel, Knuffle Bunny, Too. Both books were based on episodes involving his daughter, Trixie, and her indispensable companion. The third book, Knuffle Bunny Free, will be released
in September. Willems says it will be the last in the series.

“A few years ago, I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll make one every other year until Trixie goes off to college,’ but here’s a real reason for the story to end that felt natural and right,” Willems said. “All of these books are less about me and my daughter than about the kind of father I’d like to be. This is a love letter to my child, but it’s also about parenthood and that beautiful bittersweetness you feel as your child grows up.”