About the Author

Dawn Dean grew up in Indiana, then at age 18 moved to Southern Belize, where cacao became a significant part of her life. She built an 800-tree cacao plantation and mastered planting, pruning, harvesting, fermenting, and drying cacao, while she absorbed the species’ history, and learned how to grow trees as part of an agro-ecological system. We have worked with Dawn for many years (she usually joins us in S.F. during the busy holiday season), and when she proposed composing a cacao coloring book from her home in Belize, we thought it was a beautiful idea.

Dawn has been fascinated with plants since she was a child, and has experience cultivating nearly every edible plant of Southern Belize; she’s even written a practical guide, called Gardening in Southern Belize. In Barranco Village, where she lives, Dawn oversees a field gene bank for the conservation of vanilla diversity, and runs Barranco Botanics, a business that produces soaps made of Belizean ingredients (such as local cocoa butter, and yellow ginger), as well as tote bags made from recycled cacao sacks.