“Sometimes I think I am Judy Moody,” says Megan McDonald, author of Judy Moody and Stink books. “I’m certainly moody, like she is. Judy has a strong voice and always speaks up for herself. I like that.”

For Megan McDonald, being able to speak up for herself wasn’t always easy. She grew up as the youngest of five sisters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her father, an ironworker, was known to his coworkers as “Little Johnny the Storyteller.” Every evening at dinner the McDonalds would gather to talk and tell stories, but Megan was barely able to get a word in edgewise. “I’m told I began to stutter,” she says, leading her mother to give her a notebook so she could start “writing things down.”

Luckily for her fans, Megan McDonald’s writing did not stop with that childhood notebook. Her critically acclaimed Judy Moody books have won numerous awards, ranging from a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year to an International Reading Association Children’s Choice. “Judy has taken on a life of her own,” the author notes. Interestingly, the feisty third-grader is highly popular with both boys and girls, making for a strong base of fans who are among Megan McDonald’s strongest incentives to keep writing, along with “too many ideas and a little chocolate.” Megan has a B.A. in English from Oberlin College and a master’s in Library Science from the University of Pittsburgh. When she took her first writing class, her professor told her to go home and rip up all the poems she had ever written—because she was actually a prose writer. He told her she was a prose writer. Megan went home and looked up prose in the dictionary to find out what she was! Before Megan became a writer, she worked in museums, libraries, and bookstores. She has also made a living as a storyteller and a park ranger.

More recently, Megan McDonald has teamed up with illustrator G. Brian Karas to introduce a winsome picture-book duo in Ant and Honey Bee: What a Pair! The characters’ struggle to create the perfect costume is a theme the author can easily relate to. “One year,” she says, “my mother made Pilgrim costumes for all of us at Halloween. I was youngest, so when I outgrew one Pilgrim costume, there was always another to take its place. Believe it or not, some of those costumes are still around, and a whole new generation is wearing them!”

Megan McDonald and her husband live in Sebastopol, California, with a dog, two adopted horses, and fifteen wild turkeys that like to hang out on their back porch.

Author photo by Michele McDonald