Like Cornelia in TENDING TO GRACE, I have always been "a bookworm, a bibliophile, a passionate lover of books." As a child my favorite reading spot was my tree house, and I spent hours there with piles of books. I walked the mile to our town library every few days for a new supply. My favorite books were Harriet the Spy, Island of the Blue Dolphins and Where the Red Fern Grows.I knew I wanted to be a writer in the sixth grade. I never wanted to be anything else. I was a young person who stuttered, and writing gave me a voice. When teachers started telling me I was talented, I never looked back. I wrote for the literary magazine my church youth group started, "The Worm's Eye View," and then walked door-to-door selling it for twenty-five cents an issue. I studied writing in college and graduated from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. In 2002, I submitted ten pages of a novel to Alfred A. Knopf executive editor Michelle Frey. Michelle told me what I had written was good, but not good enough. She thought I could write the kind of literary novel that Knopf publishes, and she said if I tried again, she would take another look. I threw out that fledgling novel and started over, writing for almost a year, and when I finished TENDING TO GRACE, I had written a novel about Cornelia, a young girl who stutters. That novel received the American Library Association's Schneider Family Book Award. Since then I have published THE WONDER OF CHARLIE ANNE, a Parent's Choice Silver Medal winner, and soon, BEHOLDING BEE, which began in my reporting days when I interviewed a girl who worked with her parents at a traveling carnival.I am drawn to characters like Cornelia, Charlie Anne, and Bee, who "put on bigger boots and keep going," no matter what the difficulty. They help me remember to never give up....and to write every day!