Lisa Rowe Fraustino grew up in rural Maine, where she wrote her first story on the toilet seat lid when she was three (in orange crayon). She has been writing ever since on anything handy. For young readers, she has published a critically acclaimed picture book called The Hickory Chair (illustrated by Benny Andrews) and four novels, including I Walk in Dread for the Dear America series. Her middle-grade novel The Hole in the Wall won the 2010 Milkweed Prize for Children's Literature, and her YA novel Ash served as her Ph.D. dissertation at Binghamton University (SUNY).
Lisa has also edited three collections of short stories for young adults, and with Karen Coats co-edited a volume of scholarly essays, Mothers in Children's and Young Adult Literature, winner of the 2018 Edited Book Award of the Children's Literature Association (ChLA). Her scholarly article "The Rights and Wrongs of Anthropomorphism in Picture Books" also won the 2016 Article Award of the ChLA.
As both an author and a scholar, Lisa has been teaching courses in the study and writing of children's and young adult literature for over thirty years. Currently she directs the Graduate Programs in Children's Literature at Hollins University. She lives in the Sonoran Desert south of Tucson, Arizona, where she enjoys sunsets with her husband and their scruffy dog named Cholla.
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