Mario Lamo Jiménez is a Colombian author who has received literary awards in Colombia, Spain, and the United States. At the age of seventeen, Lamo published his first poem in the literary supplement of the Bogotá newspaper El Espectador; since then he has gone on to publish poems, short stories, plays, and novels. His children's book El día de la ecología (Ecology Day), originally published in Colombia by Panamericana, has been republished by SRA/McGraw-Hill in the Open Court Reading series, used for teaching Spanish in U.S. public schools. The same series includes Lamo's nonfiction book Dinosaurios gigantes de América del Sur, first published by Silver Burdett-Ginn. Lamo currently heads his own publishing company in Sacramento, California, and has translated into Spanish literary works by well-known North American authors, such as The Emerald Lizard by Pleasant DeSpain. Lamo is an anthropologist and has a master's degree in intercultural administration.