Author Bio
I've always had an overactive imagination. I blame my mother, who read to my sister and me every night and didn't buy us complicated toys and put strict limits on how much TV we could watch. We were forced to make things up and had very complicated make believe games involving orphanages, wagon trains, natural disasters, cruel schoolmarms, and epic journeys through dangerous forests. No doubt these fantasies were heavily influenced by the authors I loved: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Joan Aiken, Roald Dahl, C.S. Lewis, and Robert C. O'Brien, to name a few. Later, my addiction to After School Specials and Judy Blume novels helped shape the budding young adult author in me. When I got my hands on a copy of Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War at age twelve or thirteen, all the pieces fell into place---I felt like I'd found someone unafraid to tell it like it is, and I knew that I wanted to some day write those dark, emotional stories about the complexities of being a teenager. Well, the complexities of being a human, really, it's just that those universally human issues (the longing for acceptance, the search for identity, the fear of rejection pushing against the desire to be understood) are so vivid in our adolescent years. I don't think we ever work them out completely, they just become muted by the necessary plodding ahead of adulthood.
When I was a teen in the eighties, I loved Madeleine L'Engle (especially the O'Keefe family stories) and M.E. Kerr along with Cormier, plus a lot of random authors whose books I picked up at the school library and devoured on a nightly basis. More recent favorites among YA writers are Mary Pearson, Carolyn Coman, Brock Cole. When I do get around to adult books, I enjoy Anne Tyler, John Searles, Tom Perrotta, Meg Wolitzer, Ian McEwan, and Frederick Busch (his Girls is one of my favorite books of the last decade). In classics, I like to go back to people like Walker Percy and Carson McCullers (my novel Story of a Girl pays a little homage to Member of the Wedding - or so I like to think)---maybe that's a genetic yearning to connect with my family's southern roots. (My grandfather, William Pleasant Sharpe, was a writer and a contemporary of Reynolds Price. He won a North Carolina state literature award for nonfiction the year Price won for fiction.) Also, I like to read theologians Frederick Buechner, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Henri Nouwen and others to really dig into those issues of being human that shape my writing.
I'm a certified Internet addict. Some of my favorite places related to books and writing are:
Library Thing - A site where you can catalog all your books, see who else has them, and exchange reviews and recommendations. http://www.librarything.com
Cynthia Leitich Smith's blog - Cynthia posts great in-depth reviews with writers, agents, and editors several times a week. http://cynsations.blogspot.com
Fuse #8 - This is the blog of a children's librarian in New York who posts regularly, is always interesting, and maintains a great list of links to all the best sites in the children's publishing business. http://fusenumber8.blogspot.com/
The Class of 2K7 - The home page of a collective of authors with debut middle grade or YA novels coming out in 2007. It's makes great one-stop shopping for booksellers, teachers, and librarians to get in-depth information and find resources on these debut books and authors. I'm a member! http://www.classof2k7.com
My LiveJournal friends list - This is pretty much like my daily newspaper---it aggregates the blogs of fellow writers and helps me feel connected to my colleagues. It's sort of the equivalent of a cubicle farm for writers. http://sarazarr.livejournal.com/friends