A Note from Sharon
I grew up in Maryland at the end of what was, for a while, a dirt road. Behind our ranch house sat a kingdom of woods, creeks, and fields that I roamed for hours alone, fully convinced they were mine. A voracious reader of historical fiction, I inhaled the Little House books and Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family series. I also invented my own stories. One of them featured a spider-eating baby and became my publication debut in a fourth-grade class anthology.
Me, age 6, with my cat Misty
My childhood home was filled with my grandfather’s artwork. His portraits of the Jewish world pre-World War Il documented a heritage that still inspires me today. In fact, my grandfather became the protagonist of my first picture book, A Nickel, A Trolley, A Treasure House, which reimagines a story he often told about a teacher who changed the course of his life.
Self portrait of my grandfather, the artist Lionel S Reiss. This sits in my breakfast room, reminding me every morning to get to work.
As a child with an overactive imagination, I envisioned many futures. At various points, I saw myself as a professional flutist (despite a lack of outside encouragement), a dancer, a teacher, a doctor (unfortunately I didn’t like science and never wanted to volunteer in a hospital), or a time-traveler to Victorian England. I imagined a romanticized farm life with no mucking of stables and vegetable gardens that didn’t require weeding. In my real Maryland life, I simply loved being Jewish. My favorite holidays were Sukkot and Passover—the most labor-intensive ones, involving building outdoor huts and changing every dish in the house.
The sukkah my husband and I build every year, where we host family and friends for meals over the week-long holiday
The seed for my writing was likely planted during preparation for becoming bat mitzvah. Looking closely at the Torah text, I began to see how certain letters were more than mere characters; they were topped with tiny, hand-inked crowns. My teacher, Eleanor, told me those were secret flourishes, full of historical meaning, that scribes carefully placed there for over a thousand years. A literal chill ran up my spine as I realized I was seeing something that connected me to people I had never met across a vast span of time. I was connecting myself to history through story.
In a kosher Torah scroll, seven specific letters must be topped with decorative crowns or ‘tagin’-- visual reminders of the mystical layers hidden within the text.
Still, it took a while to follow that thread and begin creating those connecting stories myself. After high school, I spent a year in France where I became fluent in the language, traveled semi-recklessly to Italy, gained ten pounds eating chocolate croissants, and declined a surprise marriage proposal from a near-stranger. I eventually returned to the States to attend Harvard University. I took one writing class there and concluded I wasn’t a “real” writer; in my mind, real writers wore all black, smoked cigarettes, and gave snarky critiques.
Every landscape I’ve called home has a page in my notebook
Instead, I pursued other paths. I worked at a counseling center for women, fulfilled my childhood dream of becoming a teacher and, later, became a school administrator. Along the way, my husband and I lived in Massachusetts and Puerto Rico, and then, with our children, in DC, Florida, Connecticut, and Israel. These diverse settings—from Miami mango trees to Israeli deserts—filled my notebooks with the landscapes that now populate my pages.
Rennes, France, where I lived for a year after high school—a moody setting for a future book?
My writing life turned serious during a long recovery from a degenerative disease. While a brilliant surgeon eventually gave me back the gift of walking, the period I spent in a wheelchair gave me deep insight into characters living with physical disabilities. Today, I live in Pennsylvania with a large flower garden that, alas, requires constant weeding. I am a student of Gemara and a published author of picture books, including the Sydney Taylor Notable A Nickel, A Trolley, A Treasure House and the PJ Library selection All Kinds of Strong. With my debut YA novel, Last Days in Moav, set at the end of the biblical book of Deuteronomy, I find myself back at the Passover story I loved as a child—still the girl thrilled by the idea of being connected to my people across the millennia.
My table, set for the Passover seder, where we retell the story of the Israelites’ exodus from slavery in Egypt
Download high-res publicity photos, multi-length bios, and suggested interview starters.
Media Toolkit
I grew up in Maryland at the end of what was, for a while, a dirt road. Behind our ranch house sat a kingdom of woods, creeks, and fields that I roamed for hours alone, fully convinced they were mine. A voracious reader of historical fiction, I inhaled the Little House books and Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family series. I also invented my own stories. One of them featured a spider-eating baby and became my publication debut in a fourth-grade class anthology.
My childhood home was filled with my grandfather’s artwork. His portraits of the Jewish world pre-World War Il documented a heritage that still inspires me today. In fact, my grandfather became the protagonist of my first picture book, A Nickel, A Trolley, A Treasure House, which reimagines a story he often told about a teacher who changed the course of his life.
As a child with an overactive imagination, I envisioned many futures. At various points, I saw myself as a professional flutist (despite a lack of outside encouragement), a dancer, a teacher, a doctor (unfortunately I didn’t like science and never wanted to volunteer in a hospital), or a time-traveler to Victorian England. I imagined a romanticized farm life with no mucking of stables and vegetable gardens that didn’t require weeding. In my real Maryland life, I simply loved being Jewish. My favorite holidays were Sukkot and Passover—the most labor-intensive ones, involving building outdoor huts and changing every dish in the house.
The seed for my writing was likely planted during preparation for becoming bat mitzvah. Looking closely at the Torah text, I began to see how certain letters were more than mere characters; they were topped with tiny, hand-inked crowns. My teacher, Eleanor, told me those were secret flourishes, full of historical meaning, that scribes carefully placed there for over a thousand years. A literal chill ran up my spine as I realized I was seeing something that connected me to people I had never met across a vast span of time. I was connecting myself to history through story.
Still, it took a while to follow that thread and begin creating those connecting stories myself. After high school, I spent a year in France where I became fluent in the language, traveled semi-recklessly to Italy, gained ten pounds eating chocolate croissants, and declined a surprise marriage proposal from a near-stranger. I eventually returned to the States to attend Harvard University. I took one writing class there and concluded I wasn’t a “real” writer; in my mind, real writers wore all black, smoked cigarettes, and gave snarky critiques.
Instead, I pursued other paths. I worked at a counseling center for women, fulfilled my childhood dream of becoming a teacher and, later, became a school administrator. Along the way, my husband and I lived in Massachusetts and Puerto Rico, and then, with our children, in DC, Florida, Connecticut, and Israel. These diverse settings—from Miami mango trees to Israeli deserts—filled my notebooks with the landscapes that now populate my pages.
My writing life turned serious during a long recovery from a degenerative disease. While a brilliant surgeon eventually gave me back the gift of walking, the period I spent in a wheelchair gave me deep insight into characters living with physical disabilities. Today, I live in Pennsylvania with a large flower garden that, alas, requires constant weeding. I am a student of Gemara and a published author of picture books, including the Sydney Taylor Notable A Nickel, A Trolley, A Treasure House and the PJ Library selection All Kinds of Strong. With my debut YA novel, Last Days in Moav, set at the end of the biblical book of Deuteronomy, I find myself back at the Passover story I loved as a child—still the girl thrilled by the idea of being connected to my people across the millennia.