About Me

The Long Version

Like most writers, I could never make a living writing fiction, so over the years I’ve worked a variety of jobs. In fact, I tried pretty much anything someone would hire me to do. That means I’ve fried fast-food burgers, cleaned offices, put together nail files in a factory, planted morning glories for a biology-department experiment, worked in libraries, bookstores, academic departments, and offices, done computer technical support, and written software documentation. I was a great babysitter and a terrible, terrible waitress. Nowadays I spend my days looking after my family and writing fiction. I live with my husband, my son, and our scrappy cat, Barnaby, in the New Jersey suburbs.

I read a lot. I read fiction, for kids and adults, and a lot of non-fiction, about stuff like space, science, and history. But it isn’t the only thing I like to do. I also like to cook, watch movies, do handicrafts, and spend time outside walking, hiking, gardening, and looking for found materials for art projects. I get a lot of entertainment from watching the variety of wildlife that moves through my neighborhood—from funnel-web spiders to turkey vultures and Eastern coyotes, all of it less than 20 miles from New York City.