Aly McKnight is a self-taught watercolor artist and illustrator whose work puts Indigenous stories on the page in full color. An enrolled member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, she comes to the Salt Lake Book Festival with Fire in Your Belly (Chronicle Books, September 2026), written by Cree poet Rebecca Lafond. It’s the story of a young Cree girl whose kookum tells her how the world began: embers fell from the sky and made every living thing, and a small piece of that sky still lives warm in all of us — glowing when we pick summer raspberries, hissing when a storm of feeling rolls through, catching fire when we laugh hard enough to fall over.

Aly was born in Reno, grew up in a small farming community in northern Nevada, and is the second-youngest of eight children. She came to children’s books in 2020 with The Gift of the Great Buffalo, written by Carole Lindstrom, and has since illustrated Why We Dance with Deidre Havrelock. She works entirely by hand, in watercolor and graphite, and her paintings almost always start from the same place: the connection between people and every other living thing, bison especially. 2026 is a big year for her — Fire in Your Belly arrives in September and Along the Good Red Road follows in October.

She lives in Utah with her partner and their daughter, and spends her time painting, beading, and traveling with her family through Idaho, Nevada, and Utah. Join us in the Children’s Room for an hour of reading out loud, looking closely at the paintings, and talking about the big feelings kids carry around all day.