Biography margaret haddix

Margaret Peterson Haddix is an author who has written more than forty books for children. She is the author of the Greystone Secrets series.

Biography[]

Margaret Peterson Haddix grew up on a farm near Washington Court House, Ohio. She graduated from Miami University (of Ohio) with degrees in English/journalism, English/creative writing and history. Before her first book was published, she worked as a newspaper copy editor in Fort Wayne, Indiana; a newspaper reporter in Indianapolis; and a community college instructor and freelance writer in Danville, Illinois.

She has since written more than 40 books for kids and teens, including Running Out of Time; Double Identity; Uprising; The Always War; the Greystone Secrets series; the Shadow Children series; the Missing series; the Children of Exile series; the Under Their Skin duology; and The Palace Chronicles. She also wrote Into the Gauntlet, the tenth book in the 39 Clues series.&#; Her books have been honored with New York Times bestseller status, the International Reading Association’s Children’s Book Award; American Library Association Best Book and Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers notations; and numerous state reader’s choice awards. They have also been translated into more than twenty different languages.

Haddix and her husband, Doug, now live in Columbus, Ohio. They are the parents of two grown kids.

Greystone Secrets[]

To be added.

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Margaret Peterson Haddix published her first novel for young readers, Running Out of Time, in and has since published more than 41 books. In her new series, which begins with The Strangers, three siblings—Chess, Emma, and Finn Greystone—investigate their mother’s disappearance and learn of an alternate world while cracking codes, solving clues, and uncovering secrets. Haddix spoke with PW about the seed of an idea planted more than 30 years ago, the appeal of writing a cast of siblings, and her transition from journalist to novelist.

From where did the inspiration for this unique series premise come?

Out of all the books and series I’ve ever written, this is definitely the one that had the longest gestation period. The original seed was planted by a newspaper column I read 31 years ago. It was about a weird circumstance: a mother of three small children happened to read about a car accident [that caused] the tragic deaths of three other children. The three children who had died were the same ages as her kids. The oldest two had the same names as her oldest two children and the third child had the name they would have used if the child had been born a boy. For a period of time, she was too terrified to drive her own car because of the eerie coincidences. The story stuck in my mind because it was so weird.

A couple years ago, I started thinking about the potential of the story in the column. I considered what it would be like to be aware of all those similarities as one of the surviving kids. And then I thought, that’s interesting, but what if those other children didn’t die? What if they were kidnapped? Then there’s still some chance of rescue.

Did you know from the start that it would be a story told in multiple volumes?

I was pretty sure from the beginning that it would be a series. There was a lot I didn’t have figured out&md

Although she describes her childhood self as having "a short attention span" and despising "anything that reeked of busy work" at school, Margaret Peterson Haddix grew up to be a successful journalist before she found the courage to pursue her dream of writing novels.

Haddix grew up on a farm in Washington Courthouse, Ohio - the same small town where her family has lived since the early s. Her father was a farmer and her mother, a nurse; her time as a young woman was equally split between home and farm chores with her three siblings (two brothers and one sister), and numerous academic and extracurricular pursuits. She liked most of her classes at school but wasn't too fond of the schoolwork itself. "What I hated was not any particular subject, but anything that reeked of busy work; all the pointless assignments that took a lot of time but taught me nothing." Through it all, though, she always knew she wanted to write -- spending much of her free time reading and composing poetry in secret.

Her father was her inspiration, says Haddix, because of the wild and entertaining stories he always told -- stories "about one of our ancestors who was kidnapped, about some friends who survived lying on a railroad bridge while a train went over the top of them, about the kid who brought possum meat to the school cafeteria when my father was a boy."

Though her dad's stories sparked an interest in writing, life in a small town afforded Haddix very little exposure to career writers; she assumed early on that she would only be able to earn a living doing what she loved if she became a journalist. So when she attended college at Miami University in Oxford, Haddix majored in English and began writing for the school newspaper by the end of her freshman year.

With guidance from one of her second-year journalism professors, she obtained newspaper internships during her summer breaks from college -- first, at the Urbana (Ohio) Daily Citizen just after her sophomore year, and th

American author

Margaret Peterson Haddix (born April 9, ) is an American writer known best for the two children's series, Shadow Children (–) and The Missing (–). She also wrote the tenth volume in the multiple-author series The 39 Clues.

Biography

Haddix grew up on a farm about halfway between two small towns: Washington Court House, Ohio, and Sabina, Ohio. Her family was predominantly farmers and she grew up in a family of voracious readers. Some of her favorite books growing up included E.L. Konigsburg books, Harriet the Spy, Anne of Green Gables, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Anne Frank, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and The Little Princess.

She graduated from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio with degrees in English/journalism, English/Creative writing, and History. While in college, Haddix worked a series of jobs. She was an assistant cook at a 4-H camp, but almost every other job has been related to writing. During college, she worked on the school newspaper and had summer internships at newspapers in Urbana, Ohio; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Indianapolis, Indiana.

Haddix chose to pursue fiction writing after her husband, Doug, became a news reporter, because she did not want to be his employee. Her previous work as a reporter inspired her to write fiction. After documenting a wide variety of topics, she wanted to create her own plots and characters. Haddix experienced a long period of having her writing rejected by publishers before her first two books were accepted in and Her first book was Running Out of Time, published when Haddix was pregnant with her second child, and her first child was one and a half years old. Her second book, Don't You Dare Read This, Mrs. Dunphrey, followed shortly after. The Summer of Broken Things, written in , is Haddix’s most recently published stand-alone book.

Haddix has written more than 40