Kristiana Gregory
Kristiana Gregory was born in Los Angeles, California. She
attended both public and private schools on the West Coast and
in New Mexico. She always wanted to be a writer and received
her first rejection letter (ofr a poem) at age eleven.
After graduating from high school, she began taking a variety
of college courses and jobs that provided experiences for her
writing career. Foremost were her positions as a daily newspaper
reporter and as a book reviewer for the Los Angeles Times.
Through these jobs she met her writing mentors, Charlie Ferrell
and Art Seidenbaum, both compassionate and thoughtful men.
Married for twenty years, she lives in Boise, Idaho with her
husband, their two teenage sons and two golden retrievers. When
writing books, she enjoys taking long walks with her furry companions
to help her sort out ideas. When in between writing projects,
she vows to learn how to cook and play golf. Minor progress
has been made so far. She is an avid reader of historical fiction.
Kristiana's first book, Jenny of the Tetons, was published
in 1989 and won the Golden Kite Award for best children's fiction.
Her third book for Scholastic, The Winter of Red Snow: The
Revolutionary War Diary of Abigail Jane Stewart, published
in 1996, helped launch the popular Dear America series. Scholastic
published her second book in the series, Across the Wide
and Lonesome Prairie: The Oregon Trail Diary of Hattie Campbell,
in 1997. Since then Kristiana has written several more Dear
America books, including Cleopatra VII: Daughter of the Nile,
one of the first in the Royal Diary series. She has also written
several books about the Old West and California history. Earthquake
at Dawn, her book about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake,
won the 1993 California Book Award for best juvenile fiction.
