I was born in Birmingham, Alabama on July 7, 1968. My father worked as a civil rights attorney and fought for social justice. I dedicated A Thousand Never Evers to my dad, because his work in the civil rights movement inspired this story.

When I was still a baby, my parents and I moved to Marblehead, Massachusetts, a cold New England seaside town. Shortly after we moved, my brother and sister were born. (My mother didn’t know she was having twins until they came out!)
 
I went to the public schools and when I was in fourth grade, I had an amazing teacher who invited our whole class to her wedding! She also helped us all make books for our short stories and poetry. Right then and there, I caught the writing bug! I am proud to share one of my first poems:

Unfortunately, I can’t say I remained as cheery through middle school. No one told me I was supposed to look like everyone else—blonde hair, blue eyes, and a fairly flat chest. I just didn’t turn out that way. In middle school, I really felt different, especially when someone in my seventh grade math class drew a swastika—a symbol of hatred against Jews--on the cover his math book and everyone laughed. After that, I started to ask my father all kinds of questions about his work to get people in our country treated equally.

Thankfully, when I got to high school, two things happened that changed my life and made me feel that I could play a small role in shaping my world. First, I took a class called Facing History and Ourselves. In my Facing History class, my teacher actually talked about things that mattered: Why friends turn on each other, why kids are afraid to stand up to bullies, and how easy it is to go along with the crowd. We talked about the Holocaust, a time when six million Jews, as well as millions of Catholics, gays, Gypsies, disabled people and others, were murdered just for being born who they were. And then we talked about how people throughout history have stood up and fought against injustice. 

The other transformative thing that happened to me during high school was that I joined an organization called Children’s Express that trains young people to cover the news. (It’s now called Y-Press.) The stories I wrote were published in newspapers across the country. Working as a young writer was exhilarating, since I learned that I could contact anyone, no matter how important, and ask them questions about whatever I wanted to know.

After high school, I went to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where I majored in English literature. But the most interesting class I took in college wasn’t English. It was painting. As I painted, I stared at a tree for three hours solid each and every week. I have to say, I thought I might finally make it into the Guinness Book of World Records—as the first person to literally die of boredom! But after a couple weeks, something strange happened: I started to see a thousand shades of green I’d never seen before. Without a doubt, learning to look so carefully at my surroundings greatly improved my writing.

Now I know a lot of college students spend their spring breaks on the beach in Florida, but I was never into that. During one of my spring breaks, my dad invited me to travel with him back to Birmingham, Alabama. To me, that was very cool! I saw the hospital where I was born. During that time, my father was fighting to dismantle segregation in local maternity wards. I also saw the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church where the four girls were killed when some white supremacists bombed it. And I met my father’s African American law partners and their children, and we talked about our lives.

I wanted to learn more about how to stop discrimination and racism, so after college I went to work at the Facing History and Ourselves headquarters and tried to spread the word about this important educational program. Then I got my degree in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. While there, I studied how girls were faring in the primary education system in Malawi, Africa. I also spent a summer in Belize, Central America and taught children there to report the news, just as I had done when I was young.

Later, I got a job working on a hunger and poverty relief project. Through this job, I had the opportunity to visit the Delta and talk to Mississippi residents over the phone on a regular basis. I really fell in love with the culture. People were so warm and open. Here’s a photo of me and some of the terrific children I met in the Delta:

It was kids like these who made me realize that even though I was working on programs to help children, I wanted to work directly with children all of the time. I wanted to teach, so I went back to school and got my master’s degree in education from Simmons College. It was the first day of classes, and my professor made the whole class promise never to get married during our first year of teaching, because it would be way too stressful to plan a wedding at that time. I raised my right hand and swore along with the rest of the class.

Then I promptly broke the promise.

I got a job teaching sixth grade at the same elementary school that President John F. Kennedy attended, and organized my wedding in between writing lesson plans and correcting homework. I married Oren in the summer. Little did Oren know at the time that he wasn’t just marrying me—but all the characters from A Thousand Never Evers who lived in my head. Lucky for me, Oren has grown to love Addie Ann, Elias, Uncle Bump, Mama, and Mrs. Jacks as much as I do.

After my fifth year of teaching, I gave birth to my son. Shortly after he was born, I found an agent, sold A Thousand Never Evers, and moved with my family from Boston to Austin, Texas, where I’m currently working on my next book.