Biography

Upon making my first paint stroke at the age of four, I fell in love with creating things. I remember that brushstroke vividly because in my excitement, I knocked over the jar filled with water. A few times. (Maybe the patient adults who refilled it for me would say it was several times).

Being sopping wet didn’t stop me from wanting to paint the world – at first with pictures, and then with words. This desire grew into a love of reading and writing and telling stories. My sister in the upper bunk of our bunkbeds heard my very first stories. She wanted more so I kept going.

I got my degree in Creative Writing as soon as I was released from high school in the 1990’s. But, as happens often, the detours of life (which in my case was raising a family and embarking on a teaching career) took me away from my dream until 2006, when I re-dedicated myself to my desire to “grow up and become an author.” For a couple of times a week, I acted like I had another job on top of teaching second graders; it was a part-time one consisting of learning all I could about the publishing industry while slowly finishing a manuscript.

Ten years later, I sold my first book, Saints and Misfits. That book went on to become a William C. Morris Award finalist and the winner of both the APALA and Middle East Book Honor awards. It also made several best-YA-of-the-year lists, as well as state reading lists. It made me an author, finally, ever since I first dreamed of it as an eleven-year-old.

Excited that my long-held desire was finally coming true, I took a leave from my twenty-year teaching career to focus on writing more books. Love from A to Z, The Proudest Blue, and Once Upon an Eid quickly followed. In 2019, I resigned from teaching to write (and draw) full-time.

Now, I don’t want to stop telling stories.