Vicki Grove

Vicki Grove lives in a 100-year-old farmhouse on a few acres of land outside of Ionia, Missouri (pop. 118). Her son and daughter, Michael and J.D., attend college, and her husband Mike is a music teacher and directs a bell choir. They have lots of cats and a goldfish pond teeming with bossy, headstrong goldfish. Sharing the pond with that rambunctious crew is one gentle red-eared turtle, Yertle. Behind the house grow three cherry trees, three apple trees, a corn patch, grape vines, and, on a good year, enough strawberries for Vicki to make a dozen jars of jam.

Vicki has written for magazines ranging from Twilight Zone to Reader’s Digest. She received the 1996 SCBWI Magazine Merit Award for a story in American Girl. Altogether, she’s published about 300 articles and short stories. “Because it’s not such a huge time and energy commitment, writing a short story is kind of like eating popcorn,” she says. “Writing a book, on the other hand, is a big deal, sort of like Thanksgiving dinner. You’d get tired of snacking or feasting if you did it all the time, so I alternate!”

Eight of Vicki’s eleven books are middle grade or young adult novels for Putnam. Her most recent are Rimwalkers, Crystal Garden, Reaching Dustin, The Starplace, and Destiny. Reaching Dustin and The Starplace were School Library Journal Best Books of 1998 and 1999.

Vicki writes every day in a tiny white office her dad built in her hayfield. He modeled it on her childhood playhouse, and it has its own birdhouse (where a tree frog named Joop is living). A purple clematis vine snakes up the side of the office, and beneath it grows a white peony bush Vicki transplanted from her grandmother’s farmhouse in Illinois, the setting for Rimwalkers.