Cynthia Lord grew up next to a lake in rural New Hampshire. As a child, she loved to read and create stories. The earliest writing she remembers doing was a goofy song called “Ding Dong the Cherries Sing,” which she wrote at the age of four with her sister and forced everyone to listen to over and over. As Cynthia grew up, she wrote poems, newspaper articles, and stories.
As an adult, when Cynthia sat down to write her first children’s book, she knew it would be a middle-grade novel. As she recalls, “I remember being ten years old, lying on our pier, listening to the seagulls calling, and daydreaming about Borrowers and chocolate factories and secret gardens.”
A former teacher and bookseller, Cynthia still enjoys nature and reading a good book. And she hears plenty of seagulls at her home near the ocean in Maine, where she lives with her husband and two children. She says, “Though I have children of my own now, when I write it’s always for that daydreaming girl I used to be.”
Rules, Cynthia’s first novel, was a Newbery Honor and Schneider Family Book Award winner and a New York Times bestseller. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed novel Touch Blue, and the picture books Hot Rod Hamster and Happy Birthday, Hamster. Visit her at www.cynthialord.com.