About Me
Fun Facts About Me:
Most of my ideas come to me before I fall asleep or just as I’m waking up.
My favorite fictional characters are Junie B Jones, Matilda, and Pippy Longstockings.
I’m a big sucker for pets in books. My family almost exclusively fosters and adopts senior animals (we currently have 2 dogs, a cat, and a leopard gecko).
I’m an extrovert, karaoke addict, and can’t resist an invitation to get up on stage.
If I could have any superpower it would be stepping inside a book.
I believe every child has unique gifts waiting to be discovered.
Hi! I’m Ali. I’m a life-long lover of all things kids lit! I’m an avid consumer and a passionate creator.
My proudest childhood memories are of writing and illustrating stories of fairies and field mice for my elementary school paper and staying up through the night, in high school, to pen my first novel about a teen’s trip to the afterlife (not as morbid as it sounds).
When I became a mom, spending my days seeing the world through the eyes of my boys and reading the books that made me fall in love with reading, I became reinitiated into the magical world of children’s literature.
As a kid I cherished the books that transported me to warm and cozy interior spaces and to extraordinary, enchanting settings, with adventure and lovable characters that instantly felt like family. I would fall asleep with dog-eared copies of A Wrinkle in Time and The Bridge to Terabithia tucked in beside me as if to absorb them through osmosis. They were an escape, they were an adventure, and they spoke to my own experience of belonging, of grief, of love.
They say every book is a love letter. When I sit down to write I know just who I’m writing to. I’m writing to the curious little kid so full of imagination and wonder, to the insecure and wary twelve year old unsure of her place in the world, and to the irreverent teen stuck between the innocence of childhood and the overwhelm of impending adulthood. I write to myself, in every stage of my life, and I write to every child, like me, who has ever needed a love letter.
When I’m not writing or watching with stifled panic as one of my son’s demonstrates a one-legged hang from the monkey bars while the other one tickles him, I’m home on the couch with the cat devouring books like the ink is vanishing, or walking in the woods with our two dogs, seeking inspiration.