photo credit: Heather Weston

I was born in New York City, grew up in Cambridge, MA and Seattle, WA, studied English at Vassar, and then came to New York to get my doctorate in 19th-century English literature at Columbia. My dissertation was called "The Reading Public and the Illustrated Novel, 1890-1914," and a chapter of it can be found in the first issue of the journal Book History.

Tongue First, a book of essays, was published in 1998. A novel, Mister Posterior and The Genius Child was published in 2002. It was a Barnes and Noble "Discover Great New Writers" pick.

My father is playwright Len Jenkin, and together, he and I wrote a novel for children called The Secret Life of Billie's Uncle Myron (1996). Subsequently, my first picture book, Five Creatures was awarded the Charlotte Zolotow Honor and the Boston Globe/Horn Book Honor. Forthcoming children's books are listed on the Books for Children page, and other picture books currently in stores include Love You When You Whine, Daffodil, and That New Animal. That New Animal received the Boston Globe/Horn Book Honor as well. A group of middle-grade short stories, Toys Go Out, was published in 2006 with illustrations by Paul O. Zelinsky.

I've written articles for a number of magazines in England and America, and for the essay collections Surface Tension: Love, Sex and Politics Between Lesbian and Straight Women (edited by Meg Daly, S&S/Touchstone, 1996) and Letters of Intent (edited by Anna Bondoc and Meg Daly, Free Press, 1999).

For school visits (nursery-4th) in the New York City area, email me or read about my fees and the kind of presentations I do. The biographical essay on this site talks about how I came to write books for children.