Laurie Halse Anderson was born on October 23, 1961, in Potsdam, New York, and grew up in Syracuse with her sister, Lisa. Her father, Reverend Frank A. Halse, Jr., is a Methodist minister, and her mother, Joyce Mason (Holcomb) Halse, had a management career. Anderson's parents penned poetry and encouraged her to apply her strong imagination to reading and writing: as a child she used to pretend she was a polar bear as she waded through deep snow in her neighborhood.

Anderson often composed stories on her father's typewriter and was excited when she learned to create haiku in second grade.

This experience inspired her to devote herself to understanding words in order to express herself artistically as a writer. She read voraciously through her school's library collection, which she considered magical. Anderson was drawn especially to poetry, history, and geographical and cultural books. Heidi and...