I've loved books since I was old enough to love anything, and I've really loved them since I was middle-grader and started discovering them on my own. I got way into series books, the kind where you know the characters as well as you know your own friends but you read the backstory chapter anyway, because what if you miss something? Choosing these often over “classics” was my first rebellious act, and the rush might’ve lured me into a life of crime if Anne of Green Gables hadn’t become my bestie a bit later in the middle-grade years. (She’s a good influence.)
 

Somewhere around there, I decided to be an author.
 

The exact details of that plan evolved over the years. I was going to be a really young author! (I sent out my first queries when I was fourteen. By mail, which was a thing then.) I was going to write for adults! (Nah.) I was going to be a poet! (My major projects right now are fiction and sometimes picture books, but I still write and love poetry. And parodies! For charities!)
 

Eventually, I landed in the MFA program in Writing for Children at Simmons College (now Simmons University), where I learned more than I could’ve imagined there was to know about children’s books and writing. Then I worked as a children’s bookseller at Brookline Booksmith, where I learned just as much about readers. Now I work at The Horn Book, which brings all of that together. I've served on the Sydney Taylor Book Award, Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, and Walter Dean Myers Award committees. And on the weekends, I write. I'm represented by Amy Stern of the Sheldon Fogelman Agency.

 

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