Austin Kleon

Author, "Steal Like An Artist" + "Show Your Work"

Austin Kleon is a writer, artist, speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. His work has been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, PBS Newshour, TIME, The Atlantic, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal. Now he’s brought his depth and range of experience as a creator to his book, Steal Like An Artist, an illustrated manifesto for creativity in the digital age.

Steal Like An Artist is a lesson in applied creativity. It’s based on a list Austin drew up one day of key insights he wishes he’d known when he started out. He boiled them down into pithy phrases: “Steal like an artist”, “Use your hands”, “Creativity is subtraction”, and many more. He turned that list into a talk, the text and slides from the talk “rocked the creative world” (GalleyCat) and went viral—and since it’s been online, the original blog post has reached millions of readers.

His most recent book, The Steal Like An Artist Journal, is an interactive journal and all-in-one logbook to get those creative juices flowing and keep a record of ideas and discoveries.

“Immersing yourself in Steal Like An Artist is as fine an investment in the life of your mind as you can hope to make.” — The Atlantic

The followup, Show Your Work!, is a guide to the next step: getting known. Organized around another collection of pithy phrases — “You don’t have to be a genius”, “Share something small every day” — Show Your Work! shows you how sharing generously can work in your favor online. Ranging from broader life lessons about work to the practicalities of internet life, it’s an inspiring manifesto for succeeding as any kind of artist or entrepreneur in the digital age.

Austin is also the author of Newspaper Blackout, a collection of poetry made by redacting newspaper articles with a permanent marker. His art has been called “brilliant” by New York Magazine and The New Yorker said his poems “resurrect the newspaper when everyone else is declaring it dead.” Austin speaks on creativity, visual thinking, and being an artist online.