Ann Cameron's life
I was born
in Rice Lake, Wisconsin in 1943 in the middle of an
October
blizzard. My dad was a lawyer. My mother had been a high school
English teacher and was on the town library board. I
grew up on 40 acres of land outside town. From the time I was
small I loved exploring nature--picking wild violets, staring
into horses' eyes, puzzling over where the sun went when it went
down.
Later, my childhood friends and I made up our own games.
We spent lots of time outside, skiing, hiking, biking and fishing.
Our world seemed to us almost separate from the world of adults.
I think the independence we enjoyed is disappearing from the
life of American children today. I want them to experience it
through my books.
There
was no TV in our town until I was nine years old. I listened
to stories on the radio. The best thing about them was I could
imagine all the characters and the places in my own mind. Radios
before the invention of transistors were enormous; so I believed
the voices I heard came from inside the radio, where the people
who spoke were living. The only thing I couldn't understand was
how they got their food.
My older sister, Jennifer, was a big influence on my life.
She was 
smart,
a good student and also very popular. People were always asking
me if I was going to be like her, or calling me by her name instead
of mine. I disliked it that people didn't see me as an individual,
but my sister's example spurred me to try to be outstanding.
Also influencing
my life was the family cottage on Bear Lake, near Haugen, Wisconsin.
We lived there during the summer and there's where I learned
to fish and love boats and the water, and to swim long distances
in lake water. Now I swim for an hour or two nearly every day
in Lake Atítlan. Bear Lake was the model for "Lost
Lake" in The Secret Life of Amanda K. Woods.
Years later I graduated from Harvard College (the girls' part was known as Radcliffe). There I studied with the famous poet Robert Lowell. Only ten students a year at Harvard got the chance to study poetry writing with Mr. Lowell, so I was thrilled and very lucky that he chose me for his course. At first he didn't find much to like in my poems--one line out of 20, or two lines out of ten. But when I finished the course, he called one of my poems "magical" and encouraged me to keep writing and to go to New York to work in publishing.
I did. I worked for Harcourt, Brace--the publishers of Virginia Woolf, Lewis Mumford, George Orwell, Anais Nin, Mary McCarthy, and Gunter Grass. I only earned $85 a week, but it was enough to live on in 1966, and I could almost live on the atmosphere of that great publishing house, where some of the deepest-thinking writers of the twentieth century casually strolled by my desk.
Then I went back to school, to get a Masters of Fine Arts in English at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop. After that I lived in California, New York again, Panajachel, Guatemala, and now in Portland, Oregon.
Frances Foster has been the editor of all my books beginning with The Seed, published in 1974. She and I have worked together all those years, and she has become a dear friend. I trust her opinion of my work. Frances has a perfect ear for the authentic voices of her authors. She knows when a story has gone off course, and always notices if a detail doesn't quite ring true. She brings out the best in my work, without ever making it sound like somebody else's.
In 1990 I married Bill Cherry--a wonderful man with many 
talents:
he's been a sailor, a land surveyor, a newspaper reporter and
editor, and the staff director of a Congressional subcommittee
in Washington, D.C. Now he's retired. He was probably the most
popular man in Panajachel: every day he gave away candy to all
the children he passed in the street. He studies computers, too,
and does all the cooking at our house. He promises to keep it
up--as long as I keep writing books. (I'm afraid if I don't write,
I won't eat!)
Guatemala has a very high illiteracy rate. I went from living in the shadow of great writers, to living among neighbors who can't read--but I learned a lot from them about patience, endurance, and valuing the most important things in life--the beauty of each day, the beauty of people. Click to see a slide show of pictures of Panajachel.
I worked for the local library, Biblioteca Popular de Panajachel, so that Guatemalan children will have the same opportunity to read that I had growing up. I have included a special page about the library in my website, with lots of pictures and information.
Now I live in Portland, Oregon, in an apartment right downtown. On the ground floor is a supermarket so Bill can go to the grocery store through the underground parking garage on rainy days. We are one block from the art museum, two from the history museum, five from the concert hall, five from the main Multnomah Public Library, six from the nearest movie theater, and 11 from Powell's City of Books, about the largest bookstore anywhere. We walk everywhere we go and have at least one cultural activity every week.
For more information about me, go to the reference section of your library and read Gale Research, Something About the Author: Autobiography Series, volume 20; and Gale Research, Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, 1997. Additional biographical information may be found at the Random House website.
For an evaluation of my work by the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, click here--but don't forget to return by using your browser's back button.
If you can't find the answer in any of these place, write me by clicking here.
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Copyright © 2000, 2007 Ann Cameron