Jeff Kinney

Kinney was born in 1971 in Maryland and spent his childhood in the Washington, D.C., area. He did not grow up wanting to be a children’s author; his dream was to become a newspaper cartoonist.⁠[1]

He has said the character Rodrick was originally inspired by his brother, whose band was called Ground Zero.⁠[2]

Kinney is a University of Maryland alumnus of the Class of 1993; as an undergraduate he drew Igdoof, a daily comic strip for the student newspaper The Diamondback.⁠[3]

He moved to New England in 1995; as of 2019 he lived in Plainville, Massachusetts, with his family.⁠[4]

He has said he began the first draft of Diary of a Wimpy Kid in 1999, originally intending it for adults, until an editor told him it was a children’s series; he has written for children ever since.⁠[5]

Kinney spent eight years on a manuscript of about 1,300 pages originally aimed at adults; an Abrams editor met him at ComicCon and helped reshape it as a children’s series.⁠[6]

Kinney was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2009; in 2010 he won the first of six Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards for Favorite Book; and in 2016 he received Guinness World Records recognition as a bestselling author.⁠[7]

Julie and Jeff Kinney opened An Unlikely Story, a bookstore, café and event space, on the site of the historic Falk’s Market in downtown Plainville; upstairs, the Second Story hosts community events including author signings, storytimes and trivia nights.⁠[8]

In a November 2019 interview Kinney called the bookstore “really the best part of my professional life,” saying he had wanted to add some civic pride to his town and had helped build the store from the ground up.⁠[9]

In May 2020 he wrote a message to the Class of 2020 in The Boston Globe.⁠[10]

To promote Rowley Jefferson’s Awesome Friendly Adventure, he ran a socially distanced tour along the East Coast in which a different independent bookstore hosted a pop-up curbside book pick-up each day, with stops including Word Up Community Bookshop and Northshire Bookstore.⁠[11]

The August 3, 2020, Word Up stop used timed appointments: $16 admitted one parent and one child with a copy of the book, all books were pre-signed, and Kinney posed only for socially distanced photos.⁠[12]

When Book 16, Big Shot, was published in October 2021, Kinney held a “drive-thru” tour, his fourth since the pandemic hit in 2020.⁠[13]

In 2022 Kinney was inducted into the University of Maryland Alumni Association Hall of Fame.⁠[14]

On October 24, 2022, he launched a two-week, 12-city tour near the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland; Kinney said it was his first time back on a stage since 2020. He also co-wrote the song “Can You Smell Us Now” for the tour, performed by Jimmy Tatro.⁠[15]

On Maryland Day, April 29, 2023, Kinney unveiled a Greg Heffley statue in the University of Maryland’s Stamp Student Union. It was based on a piece he had commissioned seven years earlier from sculptor Allyson Vought for his Plainville bookstore, and stands alongside alumnus Jim Henson’s Kermit the Frog statue.⁠[14]

From October 26 to November 8, 2023, Kinney toured the U.S. West Coast for No Brainer, contributing $100,000 to local and school libraries and partnering with 11 publishers to donate books to help diversify library collections.⁠[16]

The tour used a game-show format he created himself, with prize money he funded personally; the McMinnville Public Library won about $4,500 at one event.⁠[6]

Kinney ran a nationwide librarian contest tied to No Brainer that drew hundreds of submissions and selected eight winners, including tribal librarian Kathy Cole; the prize included a trip to Boston to meet Kinney and tour the Wimpy Kid studio.⁠[17]

From June 7 to 9, 2024, Kinney hosted the winning librarians in Boston and at An Unlikely Story, covering airfare, hotels and meals; each had a shopping spree at the store and took home 50 new books. Grand prize winner Kelly Kiff, librarian at Sparta Middle School in New Jersey, was to join the Wimpy Kid float at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.⁠[18]

The fall 2024 Hot Mess tour comprised 14 interactive shows meant to “embrace the freedom to read”; at schools and pop-ups children could choose a free book from a diverse collection provided by First Book, with titles selected by Leo Landry, children’s book buyer at An Unlikely Story.⁠[19]

From October 19 to 28, 2025, Kinney toured 10 cities for Book 20, Partypooper, starting at An Unlikely Story in Wrentham, Massachusetts, passing through Baltimore, Richmond, Decatur and Jackson, and ending at Pearl’s Books in Fayetteville, Arkansas.⁠[20]

For Book 21, Fight or Flight, Kinney began a tour at An Unlikely Story in Wrentham on October 18, 2026, passing through states including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee and Minnesota, reaching Winnipeg, Canada, on November 1, then going on to Dublin and Limerick in Ireland and Lincoln in the U.K., with the final stop scheduled in Reading, U.K., on November 11.⁠[21]

He has said a new Wimpy Kid book takes about nine months to create: roughly six months of joke writing (about 350 jokes per book), one month for the manuscript and two months for illustration.⁠[5]

Kinney is the creator of Poptropica, which was named one of Time’s 50 Best Websites.⁠[22]

He is the author of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series and the Awesome Friendly Kid series and a #1 New York Times bestselling author.⁠[23]

Personal website: Public link: https://wimpykid.com/about-the-author/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

An Unlikely Story: Official website: https://www.anunlikelystory.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[8]