The die was cast early...

​I think I was destined to work with words. My wonderfully creative parents made my birth announcement to look like a newspaper article. Looks pretty official, no? I went on to study journalism and mass communication, and now I write. (My brother's birth announcement looked like a movie poster… and now he works in film. That is either scary, or amazing, or both!)

I grew up around books. My dad worked for a publisher in Minneapolis, where we lived, and I loved visiting his office. The walls of every conference room were festooned with spreads of books in various stages of production. It was an exciting, invigorating place, where everyone seemed to love what they were doing. And the whole office smelled of paper and ink and glue—of books. (Did you know books have a smell? Go ahead, open one and put your nose inside. Scrumptious!) In third grade, our class made a book about what we wanted to be when we grew up. I said I wanted to be a children's book author "and my dad can illustrate my books because he's an artist."

This is me sleeping in a box at my dad's office when I was two months old. Exhausted from all the excitement?

Me on my sixth birthday, about the time I learned to read.

Reading was a given. My mom read me my favorite childhood picture book, The Fourteen Bears in Summer and Winter, and later, Little Women. My dad read me his books from when he was young, like Raggedy Ann and Andy and Scalawag the Scottie. When I was 10 and a half, my brother was born, and together we enjoyed Ann Jonas’s Round Trip and Roald Dahl’s The Minpins. Of course, I also spent many a day engrossed in the worlds of Little House, Ramona Quimby, The Borrowers, and the Boxcar Children. One of my favorite books was, and is, Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson. Get out your kleenex! 
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Making books came naturally too. I wrote and illustrated stories about my imaginary friend, David; mused about what it would be like to slide down a rainbow into a pot of gold; and dreamed up tales about the characters from Candyland. I made them all into books. Sometimes I was enterprising enough to sell them to the neighbors for a little extra cash! As my brother grew up, we complied a long list of the funny things he said. One year for Mother's Day, we bound them into a hardcover book. In seventh grade, my friends and I thought we would be cool and sneaky and skip school. We were neither cool nor sneaky, and we promptly got caught. This was one of the few naughty things I did as a kid, and I learned my lesson by writing about it… and making it into a book. (The bookmaking, I recommend; the skipping school, not so much.)

 With my juvenile-delinquent days behind me, I went on to work on my high school and college yearbooks. And for two summers, I was an intern at my dad's office. The place smelled as good as ever, as I was hooked. Although my college studies at UNC-Chapel Hill focused on writing and editing for newspapers and magazines, books were my passion, and still are. 

My first book came out in 2004, and I hope there are many more to come. Many of the things I write about are things I have loved from a young age. To the right you can see my early love of both elephants and wheels! My parents brought me home from the hospital in a red, white and blue baby blanket, and I like to think that fueled my later interest in the Stars and Stripes. I am also an avid history lover. I currently live in central Massachusetts with my husband, two sons, and the many antiques we have collected. When I'm not writing or visiting schools, you can find us at museums and living history sites like Old Sturbridge Village. 

We lived in Seattle, where this photo was taken, until I was two.

Combining work and play in Sturbridge.

You can download a bio of me here.

Early writing. I loved rainbows!

Here's an interview with me from BostonVoyager magazine. 
And a list of book recs, The Best Picture Books for Ages 6-106, at Shepherd.com—a terrific site for discovering new reads!

Launching Goldenlocks and the Three Pirates