I was born on August 2^nd, 1960 in New Orleans, Louisiana exactly eleven months after my sister, Margaret.  For one month every year we are always the same age; as children we looked so much alike that people called us the McAlister twins.  I am the one on the right in the dark pants.

     Before I was one, my father left his job teaching English at Tulane University for a job teaching at Sacramento State College.  We moved west so instead of growing up in an old house with Spanish moss hanging from oak trees, Mardi Gras parades going past, and the occasional hurricane, I grew up in a sixties ranch house surrounded by tennis courts, shopping malls, and never ending sunshine.  (Imagining what if is a favorite occupation of writers.)

     Here is a picture of me when I was 10.  When I wasn’t playing tennis, I was reading or sewing or drawing.  We didn’t have a television, which made us a little weird.  I loved the Little House on the Prairie books and had fantasies of making everything by hand.  (When I read these books as an adult, I was appalled by their racial attitudes and anti-new deal politics, but I have retained a fascination with hand made objects and with the character of Laura who, like me, was a Daddy’s girl and a younger sister.)

     When I was 12 (sixth grade), my father had a sabbatical and took the family to Europe for a year.  I became interested in foreign languages and cultures.  These interests have helped me in my writing and research.  When we visited the Uffizzi Palace, I got locked in while searching for a pair of gloves I had left by a painting.  It’s no accident that my second book, Brave Donatella and the Jasmine Thief, is set in Florence.  That year I happened to meet a little Italian girl named Donatella, and I used her name in my book.

     The summer before I left home for college, I travelled to Guadalajara, Mexico with a tennis team from Sacramento.  I have worked some of the smells, sounds and sights from that trip into my first book, ¡Holy Molé!

     I have not taken a straight path to becoming a children’s writer, (I’m not sure there is such a thing), but when I look back I realize that’s what I always wanted to be.  As you can see from this plan for a book I made when I was just learning how to write in cursive, I intended to write legends and fairy tales from the very beginning.

     I slogged through graduate school, wrote a dissertation and a couple of articles on 17^th century poet, John Milton, and did a stint as an English Professor.  Then, I fell in love again with books by reading to my two children, Abby and Allie.  I began to write children’s books in my head, then moved to the computer, and then started sending them out to publishers.  It took several years to get something published, but playing junior tennis and writing a dissertation taught me tenacity.

     I now live in Greensboro, North Carolina where I teach writing part time at Guilford College.  I try to write something every day and send out a manuscript every week.