I’ve been fortunate to work with some of the most terrific editors in the children’s publishing business over the past decades at Penguin Random House, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Lerner Publications. These editors have helped me craft my work into better books, clearer ways of telling the stories I wanted to write. I never imagined I’d have been writing children’s books (certainly not illustrating, and certainly not winning awards and hitting the NY Times Best Seller list!) when I was growing up on Chicago's south side.

There, we identified our neighborhoods by parishes—St. Margaret of Scotland was mine.  I was always itchy to be part of a bigger world, to see how other people lived, to discover what the heck I was doing on this earth. After college, I backpacked through Europe, taught English in Athens, was a very good nanny to bambinos in Rome, and a very bad cook in Florence. Later, I worked a boatload of jobs, from TWA flight attendant to convention sales manager at Playboy Resorts. I kept journals all those years; the writing kept me centered, hopeful and real.

I finally focused on writing as a profession (huge leap of faith!) when I turned 30 and had a son. My desire to stay home with him led me to seriously examine book genres, to paint and draw, and to start sending publishers my first manuscripts, Starting with fantasy (D&D Endless Quest Adventures), I moved on to social issues (Martin Luther King Day, Earth Day, Laurie Tells) and biographies that I knew would inspire kids (Wilma Mankiller, Georgia O’Keefe, Pablo Picasso). Soon I was encouraged by editors to use my lyrical skills to do a few rhyming picture books, several with my writer/illustrator husband Richard Keep; we fell into a rhythm together, passing text and collage pictures back-and-forth for months until we had the flow and page-turns just right. I jumped back into fantasy (combined with social issues) again in my 10-book middle-grade series Hannah and the Angels, which I illustrated with little drawings from Hannah’s global adventures.

​It’s been travel that has inspired most of my 65 children’s books. Settling in the Rocky Mountains brought me the story of pioneer Aunt Clara Brown. Colonial San Miguel de Allende turned my Day of the Dead book into an 8-year stay and a bunch of Mexican-themed books, including my coming-of-age story, Truth and Salsa, set in a haunted stone tower we rented. I now live in Tennessee, where hikes in the Appalachians and gardening in a fabulous 4-season climate nourish my book projects.