Ann M. Martin

Ann Matthews Martin (born August 12, 1955) is an American children's author.

Ann Martin grew up in Princeton, New Jersey with her parents and her younger sister, Jane. After graduating from Smith College, Martin became a teacher and then an editor of children's books; she is now a full-time writer. Martin finds the ideas for her books from many different sources; some are based on personal experiences, while others are based on childhood memories and feelings. Many are about contemporary problems or events. All of Ann's characters, including the members of The Baby-Sitters Club, are fictional, but many of her characters are based on real people. Sometimes Ann names her characters after people she knows, and other times she simply chooses names that she likes^[1].

Martin has always enjoyed writing. Even before she was old enough to write, she would dictate stories to her mother to write down for her. Some of her favorite authors at that time were Lewis Carroll, P. L. Travers, Hugh Lofting, Astrid Lindgren, and Roald Dahl. They inspired her to become a writer herself^{[citation needed]}.

Since ending The Baby-Sitters Club series in 2000, Martin’s writing has concentrated on single novels, many of which are set in the 1960s. One of those novels, A Corner of the Universe, won a Newbery Honor in 2003^{[citation needed]}. In 2010, Martin published a prequel to The Baby-Sitters Club series titled The Summer Before.

After living in New York City for many years, Martin moved to the Hudson Valley in upstate New York where she now lives with her dog, Sadie, and her cats, Gussie, Adolph, Pippen, and Woody. Her hobbies include jet-skiing, rap battles, and writing flarf poetry. Her favorite thing to do is to make clothes for children^{[citation needed]}. According to the biographical blurb in the back of The Baby-Sitters Club novels, she likes ice cream, her favorite TV show is I Love Lucy, and she hates to cook.

In 1990, she created the Ann M. Martin Foundation, which provides grants to causes benefiting children, education/literacy programs, and homeless people and animals.

Works

• The Baby-sitters Club series
• Baby-Sitters Little Sister series
• The Kids in Ms. Colman's Class series
• California Diaries series
• P.S. Longer Letter Later with Paula Danziger
• Snail Mail No More with Paula Danziger
• Leo The Magnificent
• Rachel Parker, Kindergarten Showoff
• Ten Kids, No Pets
• Eleven Kids, One Summer
• Ma and Pa Dracula
• Yours Turly, Shirley
• Just a Summer Romance
• Missing Since Monday
• With and Without You
• Me and Katie (The Pest)
• Stage Fright
• Inside Out
• Just You and Me
• Bummer Summer
• A Dog's Life: The Autobiography of a Stray
• Everything for a Dog
• The Doll People series
• A Corner of the Universe
• Belle Teal
• Here Today
• Main Street (novel series)
• Needle and Thread
• 'Tis the Season
• Welcome to Camden Falls
• On Christmas Eve
• The Lost Art of Letter Writing, a short story included in the young adult anthology What You Wish For
• Ten Rules for Living with My Sister
• Because of Shoe and Other Dog Stories (edited)

References

External links

• Ann M. Martin page from Scholastic, her publisher
• Scholastic Authors and Books page for teachers with biography, interview and partial book list.
• Works by or about Ann M. Martin in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Ann M. Martin by Margaret Becker, 1993