I was born in Rhinebeck, a small town in upstate NY. There were great things about growing up in the country, like horseback riding lessons and biking around town with my friends, but there were horrors too, like the large brown spiders that terrorized me in our basement. I spent my high school years at Oakwood Friends School, a boarding school where my mom taught English. My mom was everyones' favorite teacher (even mine when I had her my junior year) and it was a little rough trying to feel independent when everyone kept telling me how cool my mom was. While there I made amazing lifelong friends and got a terrible perm.

After high school I spent a work exchange year in Colombia, land of salsa dancing, the Andes and alarmingly large spiders. It was a fantastic year (except for the spiders.)

I went to Bard College and fell in love with history. After I graduated I spent a number of years traveling and working a variety of jobs. I built houses for Habitat for Humanity (and loved it.) I did social work in Boston where I also put in time as a waitress (I wasn’t very good at it.) My two favorite jobs were teaching ESL in China for two years (incredible experience but spiders as big as my hand) and teaching high school history in an LA public school. I loved teaching and my students were awesome. Someday I’d like to teach again.

I didn’t do any creative writing until I decided I might want to get an MFA. I hadn’t written stories since high school but, I was looking for a new direction in my life and happened upon a catalogue for the New School MFA program. When I saw that they offered a concentration in writing for children, bells went off for me- I knew that that was exactly what I wanted to do. The MFA was fabulous- I learned tons, had terrific teachers (Sarah Weeks, David Levithan, Tor Seidler rocked) and most important, I met the spectacular ladies of the Longstockings.

Along the way I got lucky with a pretty terrific husband and two marvelous kids. Right now I’m home with my kids and two superawesome cats, writing a lot and doing as many author visits as I can.