I was born in Hershey, Pennsylvania, then moved east to Allentown, Pennsylvania where I got to grow up across the street from my best friend, ride bikes after school, and get wet to my ankles in the creek in my neighborhood, trying to save frogs from being swept away. I was a cheerleader and a soccer player and student council leader and a math-homework-avoider and a soap-opera watcher and an inventor of latchkey-kid type after-school school snacks. Always a story writer. All of this because I was part of an unsupervised generation who, as I like to say, let ourselves in.

 

I was lucky enough to go away to college, near the great city of Boston, Massachusetts where I learned a lot and met loads of interesting people and where I made very good friends with a lot of people from New York who dragged me back to New York City with them and well, that was the end of that.

I fell in love with NYC, my husband, and I fell in love with children's books, too. I got to live and breathe them as an editor of the Dear America series, then as a writer for that same series, and then I got to write my heart out on behalf of my coming of age self and my coming of age kids and all of their cool friends who walked arm in arm with them around the Upper West Side and said insane and impossible things that landed in the Starring Jules series. Sorry not sorry. But because I am from Pennsylvania and because there is just something about a small town, I now live in the lovely Port Washington, Long Island where New York City is just a hop, skip, and a train ride away (and where it is more appropriate to blast music while transporting children than it is on the Upper West Side—not that I didn’t try). I wrote Izzy Kline here and The Cure for Cold Feet here, which map the inside of my own childhood heart. And now I am hard at work writing books for my grownup heart. 

 

Slightly more official, less wordy bio:

My work spans children's literature, adult literary fiction, and personal essays. I am the author of eight books published by Random House, Scholastic, and Candlewick Press. I write essays and short stories and poems and novels. My work has appeared in various online magazines and at my Substack, And She Was (as in, the world was moving, she was right there with it, and she was). I teach creative writing and children's and YA literature at Hofstra University, and I direct the Roots Teen Leadership Program at Port Washington Library. My adult upmarket novel, Guidance, is in the works. I live in Port Washington with my husband. My own two kids are both finding their frequency at Emory University.