About the Author

I've been a writer since I was a kid growing up in Ohio, but I've always dabbled in art and design as well. These days, my main job is writing textbooks, but I also do graphics for a New York theater company. I'm thrilled that I found a way to combine these interests in my own books.Starting with the Great Estimations series, I've had a lot to do with how my books look. For those two books, I was the photo stylist, which meant I got to spend hours counting and arranging macaroni elbows, google eyes, fake cockroaches, and rubber ducks. And then beginning with 100 Ways to Celebrate 100 Days, I started taking some photos for my books, too. (I don't have much room here, so if you see a photo of something like an elephant in one of my books, chances are pretty good that I didn't take that one.) Books have always been a big part of my life, from buying dusty old paperbacks in any used bookstore I could find to my first job, shelving books as a page at the Shaker Heights Public Library. I even love that word: I was a page!In 2002, I decided it was about time I learned to speak a foreign language, so I started taking Spanish lessons. One of the biggest joys of this ongoing project/struggle has been learning to read literature in another language. These days I feel just as proud and excited to finish a book in Spanish as I did when I first read Half Magic, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, or The Once and Future King.Oh, about those textbooks. I've written thousands of pages in pretty much any subject you can think of, from reading and math to social studies and science. I try to make them as interesting as possible, but even so, I'd like to officially apologize for any math problems or grammar worksheets that any of my readers found particularly annoying.

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