Jane Yolen

It seems like I've been writing since birth! I started writing poems before I got to school. I wrote the class musical in first grade — both words and music. It was about a bunch of vegetables who got together in a salad. I played the chief carrot!

While I was in junior high, I wrote an entire essay in rhyme about manufacturing in New York State. In high school, I won a Scholastic poetry contest. In college, I wrote newspaper articles and songs.

Then, on my 21st birthday, I sold my first book. It was a nonfiction book about women pirates— Pirates in Petticoats. After that, I was a book writer for good.

I've also been an editor, a teacher, a storyteller, a critic, a songwriter for rock groups and folk singers— as well as a mother and now a grandmother. I've been married for 35 years to Dr. David Stemple, who is the chairman of a university computer science department.

Despite this, I only started using a computer for writing a few year ago! Before then, I wrote on a typewriter, endlessly revising. My friends call it gem polishing. But I remember something the great poet John Ciardi once said— that a poem is never finished, just abandoned. I am that way with everything I write. I just keep going over and over and over until someone yanks it out of my hands! I've written more than 200 books.

Mark Teague

Mark Teague's highly original stories have been published internationally to great acclaim for nearly two decades. His numerous awards and honors include both the Book Sense Book of the Year Award and the Christopher Medal, and his titles regularly appear on the bestseller lists of The New York Times and Publishers Weekly.