Arthur Yorinks is an American director for opera, theater, dance, film, and radio. He is the writer of more than 35 books including Hey, Al, for which his long-time collaborator Richard Egielski won the 1987 Caldecott Medal for children's picture book illustration. Yorinks studied to be a classical pianist in his teens, under former Juilliard professor Robert Bedford. Since then he has spent more than four decades writing and working in the performing arts. He has written and directed numerous plays including So, Sue Me which premiered at The Kennedy Center and It's Alive which premiered at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center. Yorinks was Philip Glass's librettist for the operas The Juniper Tree and The Fall of the House of Usher, both of which have been performed all over the world. Compelled by the use of sound in the theater, Yorinks has, for almost twenty years, experimented with the relationship between audio and live performance. In 2002 he formalized that passion into a company devoted to exploring, evolving, and redefining audio theater. [More at Wikipedia]

August 21st, 1953 in United States of America (Age 71)