BIO

I was born in Boston, Massachusetts but soon moved to Seattle, where I spent my toddler years. I had two great loves. The first was books. (Even if they were upside-down!)

My second great love was pets. (Today, I still treasure books and have a family that includes one dog, two turtles, and four cats.)

The fall after I turned two, my brother, Richard, was born. Now I had someone to share books with!

When I was five, we moved back across the country because my father had a new job as a biochemist at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland. There, my sister, Nancy, was born. Soon after, we got a new cat, who turned out to be pregnant and had kittens. Here we are with Nancy and Mumpsy, the kittens' mother, our favorite cat.

How in the world did my mother deal with a new baby and six new kittens?

My parents both loved books too and they read to us a lot. Some of my favorite books when I was young were Make Way for Ducklings and Blueberries for Sal, by Robert McClosky, The Little Engine that Could, by Watty Piper, Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel, by Virginia Lee Burton, Curious George, by H.A. Rey and all the Dr. Seuss books.

Here I am in first grade, having a bad hair day.

As I grew, I liked all the series. I liked the Clara Barton, Girl Nurse type series, the Nancy Drew series, and the Bobsey Twins. I also liked The Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Later I read Little Women and all the Louisa May Alcott books, as well as The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

When I was eleven, I went away to Girl Scout camp. I'm the one with the orange bag.

While I was there, I wrote my first published work! My poem, "Camp," was printed in Camp May Flather's mimeographed handout, "The Laurel Leaf," August 17, 1959, Vol. 29, No. 4.

This is how my poem went:
At Camp May Flather you'll love your stay,
      You'll work and learn things every day.
Yes, in your two weeks you'll have fun
      And learn to know everyone.

Notice the rhyme and the snappy indentations! I experienced the joy of seeing my words in print for the first time. I decided I wanted to be a writer.

In 1962, the spring I was thirteen, I published my first short story, "Escape to Freedom," in our junior high literary magazine. This was a rather patriotic piece about an oppressed Soviet Union boy who flees to America so he can be free. The next year, I wrote a story for the same school magazine about how our dog Susie won third place in Best Cared For Dog Owned By Girl. (Note that pet theme again.)

Those years some of my favorite books were The Diary of Anne Frank, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Bettty Smith and The Yearling by Marjorie Rawlings.

In high school, I wasn't writing stories as much, because it was the 60's and I was very busy championing civil rights and the plight of the migrant workers. I continued to read, though. I discovered Willa Cather and also read most of Charles Dickens.

In college I majored in American Government but took a lot of literature classes, where I read and read.

After college, I went to social work school in New York City. When I graduated in 1972, I moved to Cambridge Massachusetts and got a job as an outreach counselor for teenage girls. As I got to know the girls and their mothers, I began taking notes for the book that took nine years to publish. At last, after I filled a whole file cabinet with rejection slips, Hand Me Down Dreams was accepted for publication and I signed a contract! See how happy I look.

Hand Me Down Dreams came out in the spring of 1981. I will never forget the day I was roaming through a bookstore and, to my surprise, saw my own book, displayed on a pile of other new books. "That's mine!" I screamed to the cashier. "I WROTE this!"