Francesca Lia Block Biography

Baby Be-Bop About the Author

Francesca Lia Block was born on December 3,1962, in Hollywood, California, to Irving and Gilda Block. Francesca knew from an early age that she wanted to be a writer. In an interview with Shannon Maughan, she explains her early development: "I loved poetry. I kept journals and took writing classes. And I read a lot." Her parents, an accomplished painter and a poet, encouraged this development. Block practiced her writing and painting as a child. In her adolescent years she wrote poems and stories. When she reached high school, she and her friends began exploring Los Angeles. In the process she saw both the "fairy-tale magic" of the downtown and the darker, "adult" side of the city. These Los Angeles sights and sounds filtered through a teen's perception reappear often in her young adult novels.

Shortly before Block left for college at the University of California at Berkeley,...
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