![\"Author](\"http:\/\/maryelambert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/Author-Photo-for-site.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
These are a few of my favorite things:<\/p>\n
1.\u00a0Daisies<\/p>\n
2. Calvin and Hobbes<\/em><\/p>\n 3. Libraries<\/p>\n 4.\u00a0The color green<\/p>\n 5. Warm chocolate chip cookies<\/p>\n And stories. I also happen to like stories. Here’s mine…<\/p>\n Once upon a time, I was born. But I never lived in a kingdom far, far away and no one ever mistook me for a princess. I lived in Chandler, Arizona, and I remember writing my first story when I was seven or eight. It was a picture book titled “What If We Let All Gravity into Space?” I thought we could somehow siphon all of the world’s gravity supply into outer space, and then people would be able to fly and ride magic carpets.<\/p>\n One day not too long after I started writing stories, I visited my grandma. I remember sitting on one of the stools at her kitchen counter, eating M&Ms. She had just finished reading\u00a0one of my homemade picture books, and she said: “Mary Bee, when you grow up, you should be an author.”<\/p>\n “No,” I said. “I’m going to be a teacher.”<\/p>\n “You can do both.”<\/p>\n And Grandma, it turned out, was right.<\/p>\n I attended Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia where I majored in English with minors in history and education. In 2006, I took a job teaching junior high English at a charter school in Tempe, Arizona. Somewhere in the middle of my second year as a teacher, I had an idea for a story about middle school students who form a coup and take over their student government. So I decided to try writing a novel.<\/p>\n Then I wrote another.<\/p>\n And another.<\/p>\n None of my novels turned out quite right, and eventually I realized\u00a0it was time to seek professional help.\u00a0I started participating in workshops and conferences…which eventually led me to Vermont College of Fine Arts where I earned an M.F.A. in Writing for Children and Young Adults in 2014. Shortly after graduation, I signed with my agent, the lovely Linda Camacho, and one day a few months later, my phone rang in the middle of second hour. I rushed over to silence it, but when I saw Linda’s name on the screen, I answered the call instead. My\u00a0students were taken aback when their teacher suddenly broke into a happy dance.<\/p>\n My first novel had just sold.<\/p>\n This memory\u00a0is another one of my favorite things.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" These are a few of my favorite things: 1.\u00a0Daisies 2. Calvin and Hobbes 3. Libraries 4.\u00a0The color green 5. Warm chocolate chip cookies And stories. I also happen to like stories. Here’s mine… Once upon a time, I was born. But I never lived in a kingdom far, far away and no one ever mistook […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":296,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-13","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","czr-hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maryelambert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maryelambert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maryelambert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maryelambert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maryelambert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/maryelambert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":405,"href":"https:\/\/maryelambert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13\/revisions\/405"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maryelambert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maryelambert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}