Jacquelyn Mitchard has written ten novels for adults, including several New York Times bestsellers and several that have enjoyed critical acclaim and awards including Great Britain’s Talkabout prize and the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction long list. She has also written seven Young Adult novels; five children’s books; a memoir, Mother Less Child; and a collection of essays, The Rest of Us: Dispatches from the Mother Ship. Her essays have been published in newspapers and magazines worldwide, widely anthologized, and incorporated into school curricula. Her reportage on educational issues facing American Indian children won the Hampton and Maggie Awards for Public Service Journalism. Mitchard’s work as part of Shadow Show, the anthology of short stories honoring her mentor, Ray Bradbury, won the Bram Stoker Award and Shirley Jackson Award, and was short-listed for the Audie Award.
She served on the Fiction jury for the 2003 National Book Awards, and her first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, was the inaugural selection of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club, later adapted for a feature film starring and produced by Michelle Pfeiffer. Mitchard is the editor in chief and co-creator of Merit Press, a realistic YA Fiction imprint. She is a Distinguished Fellow at the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois; a DeWitt Wallace Readers Digest Fellow at the MacDowell Colony in Peterboro, NH; and a professor of Fiction and Creative non-fiction at Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier VT. She lives on Cape Cod with her husband and their nine children, who range in age from nine to 29.