Janet Hickman

Janet Hickman is a professor at Ohio State University, where she teaches children's literature. Ms. Hickman gerw up in a small town in Ohio and says she was blessed by having many strong women in her family and in her life. She has written severalbooks for children, including Zoar Blue and The Thunder-Pup.

"When I was little, the stories that interested me most were not the ones my parents read to me but the real-life ones I overheard in my grandparents' kitchen or on their front porch, where personal crises and world disasters were discussed by great-aunts and uncles and older cousins and assorted friends and neighbors. In Kilbourne, the tiny Ohio town where I grew up, extended families kept in touch, the past seemed very close to the present, and I spent a lot of time listening to people talk. What I've kept from that time in my childhood is a close attachment to family, a sense of connection to other generations, and an ear for the language of everyday speech.

"As soon as I could read, books became my favorite companions, thanks in part to a bookmobile that brought the library to us. Reading a lot soon led me to think that I could make stories of my own. I've been picking away at writing ever since I produced, at age seven, A Cowgirl Romance.

"When I went to college, though, it wasn't to study writing. That would have been considered impractical. I became a teacher instead. My first students were eighth graders who complained about an assignment from their history book. "Take the information in this chapter and use it as background for writing a story." To quiet their complaints (and because it sounded like fun), I promised to write the assignment too, The result was my first paid publication, accepted on its first submission to a magazine. This extraordinary beginner's luck earned me a few points with the eighth grade and made me think I should write a novel.

"Over the next several years, during summers off while I was teaching and in odd moments when I became a stay-at-home mom, I wrote several novels that earned nothing but rejection slips and then, finally, four that were published.

"By the end of that time I had also completed a Ph.D. at Ohio State University, where I now teach children's literature. My students are mostly teachers of grades K-8. Like my first eighth graders, most of them seem interested in having a professor who is also a writer. But working at two desks slows me down. My fifth book, Jericho, is short, but it took more than ten years to write-maybe because the story is so close to my own life. Now that my husband and I have married children, a grandchild, and a young nephew growing up as our son, its theme of family continuity seems more important to me than ever."