Bio

Award-winning author Susan Beth Pfeffer knows she's lucky she found what she wanted to do at an early age, and she's never done anything else. Born in New York City in 1948, Pfeffer grew up in the city and its nearby suburbs and spent summers in the Catskill Mountains. At the age of six, when her father wrote and published a book on constitutional law, Pfeffer decided she, too, wanted to be a writer; that year, she wrote her first story about the love between an Oreo cookie and a pair of scissors. Her first published work took a little bit longer: she wrote the young adult novel Just Morgan during her final semester at New York University, and published it the following year.

Since then, Susan Beth Pfeffer has been a full-time writer for young people. She has won numerous awards and citations for her work, which ranges from picture books to middle-grade and young-adult novels and includes both contemporary and historical fiction. Pfeffer has also written a book for adults on writing for children. When she is not working, she enjoys watching movies, both new and old, and collecting movie memorabilia, reading biographies and histories, and eating foods that are bad for her. She lives in Middletown, New York, with her two cats, Alexander and Emily.