Author Jenn Bishop grew up in Sturbridge, a small town in central Massachusetts. As a kid, she loved being outdoors and playing sports, but she also loved reading and drawing. One of her favorite things to do when a friend came over was to sit at the kitchen table and draw. She especially loved drawing families, providing a name and back story for every single person. Looking back, she realizes she was less interested in the drawing part and much more interested in the stories she was concocting.

Much of her earliest writing was drawn from real life. Her first book was about her pet rock, Christy. Like many writers, sshe kept diaries as a kid and teen. Lots of them. She was fortunate that creative writing was a big part of her language arts classes in elementary and junior high, and even more fortunate that her mom saved all of her childhood writing. When it came time for college, the University of Chicago was basically heaven for someone who loves reading and talking about nerdy things. And it didn’t hurt that her favorite library on campus, Harper Library, could pass for Hogwarts.

Four years later and with a degree in English, she did what any book-lover would do: She went to graduate school and became a librarian. She loved working with teens and children in her role as a public librarian, but she yearned to write and publish. For two years at Vermont College of Fine Arts, she learned from some of the very best writers in the business of children’s books (Rita Williams-Garcia! Elizabeth Partridge! A.S. King!) and not long after signed a contract for her first novel, The Distance to Home, which came out in 2016. 14 Hollow Road followed in 2017 and middle-grade novel, Things You Can’t Say, in 2020.

These days, she writes from my home in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she lives with her astrophysicist husband and cat Lilly—not an astrophysicist, though wouldn’t that be amazing?