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 graphic design for a New York theater company. One of the most exciting things about working on the Great Estimations series is that I’m also the photo stylist, so I get to spend hours counting and arranging macaroni elbows, google eyes, fake cockroaches, and rubber ducks. I really get to help shape the look of the final books (along with the book designer, Laurent Linn).

Of course, I never would have wanted to be a writer if I hadn’t first fallen in love with books as a reader. I’ve been fascinated by books and words since our next-door neighbor read me a book called “The Contented Little Pussy Cat” by Frances Ruth Keeler. I remember being captivated by the word contented. I loved the idea that it meant sort of the same thing as happy, but not exactly the same thing. I still do.

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 “Fox in Socks”, “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.