Laurie Halse Anderson became a finalist for the prestigious National Book Award with her first work of fiction for young adults, Speak. That 1999 novel won an array of honors for Anderson, the author of three earlier picture books for younger readers, for its searing portrayal of a fourteen-year-old girl who becomes mute after a sexual assault. Nancy Matson, writing for CNN.com, hailed Anderson as "a gifted new writer whose novel shows that she understands (and remembers) the raw emotion and tumult that marks the lives of teenagers."

Anderson was born October 23, 1961, in the northern New York town of Potsdam. Her father was a Methodist minister who wrote poetry on the side, and as a girl Anderson loved to play with his typewriter. She once commented, "I decided to become a writer in second grade. My teacher, Mrs. Sheedy-Shea, taught us how to write haiku. The giant light...