About the Author 
                                                              
                                                                     Dalandra Thomas

Dalandra Thomas was born on January 20, 1973. She was raised in Newark, New Jersey. She started drawing at the age of seven. While at home she would take the Sunday comic strips and draw the characters on her clothes and on paper. When she turned thirteen she entered an art contest that landed a representative from a well known college to visit her home and speak to her about attending their school. When the representative arrived he realized that Dalandra was only a thirteen year’s old and was too young to attend the school at the time. He made her mom promise that when she got older she would contact the school in hopes that Dalandra would apply to their school.

As she got older Dalandra entered many contests and won for her art skills. She designed a lot of posters which a few of them made it in the electric companies in Newark. While attending an art high school in the ninth grade, Dalandra created her first character called Dopy Dog. At the age of seventeen she came up with the name Noonimals. This name came from a nick name (Noony) given to her when she was a child. She and her mom came up with an idea that maybe Dalandra can create a story line which will help small children overcome fears they are faced with throughout their life.

This first story came from a situation that Dalandra was faced upon when she was a child. She created the first batch of characters she called Noonimals when she was 17 years old. After completing these characters she put them up for a few years until she was able to work on them again. A few years went by and Dalandra realized that they resembled a new breed of characters that took over the television screens. With that in mind she decided that she needed to come up with a new design for her Noonimals.

In search of a better life, Dalandra moved to Georgia and started her own family. During the years she never gave hope that one day she can take her pencil out and create a new design for her characters that children all over the world would love to see. She worked for an airline at the time and decided to stop working there shortly after the 9-11 tragedy

While going through life struggles and raising three children on her own, Dalandra found a new job which permitted her to have a lot of alone time. She took advantage of free time away from home during the day to work on her Noonimals. In 2002 she was done with all the characters. Dalandra was unable to focus on her characters for about a year.

After that she wrote the first story for Noonimals and once again put the characters and story on the shelf for another three years. After a series of events taking place in her personal life, Dalandra took out the story and characters once more and made a promise to her self that she would then complete it. In February of 2006 she found a self publishing company. As she got closer to finishing the book in April she decided that she would see if she can land a deal with a publishing house. Dalandra contacted the self publishing company and told them to put everything on hold.

She made a presentation for her book. She looked on the internet to try and find an agent that would help her get a publishing contract. After two weeks of sending out emails to agents all over the United States asking if she can send a presentation of her work, she began to send the presentation out via email to the ones who said yes. After four days of sending out the presentations she came to work to find and agent accepting her as a client and told her she believes she has a publisher that would be willing to publish her manuscript. The next day she was offered a contract from both the agent and the publisher.

The publishing company who decided to take her on was a new company and was based out of Belgium. The woman who owned the company became ill giving the company to a US agent to run. She figured that the agent in the US will have more capabilities in making her company a success.

Once the agent took over the company for the US division a short time went by before Dalandra found out she was not a very honest women. When it was all said and done, there were many authors out there who had high hopes of making it, false promises and deceit. Dalandra was able to get herself out of her contract and became depressed for a short amount of time. Dalandra was not going to let this get her down. During the course she was with the other publisher she learned so much because of the lies and false hope giving by the publisher.

At the present time Dalandra decided to start her own publishing company called Nooni Publishing with the goal of releasing as many Noonimals books as possible.

“My hopes and dreams will be to introduce my characters to the world and show that they can help young children overcome fears and concerns”

Dalandra Thomas