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Wendy Mass

Biography

Wendy Mass

I grew up in Livingston, New Jersey, about 45 minutes from New York City. I was always a big reader, the flashlight-under-the-covers type of kid. In fourth grade my best friend and I competed to see who could read more books. For every book we read, we got to add a segment to the larger-than-life construction-paper inchworm that our teacher had cleverly coined a "bookworm." Our friendly competition turned us both into life-long readers, and me into a writer. My first story was co-written with my two younger sisters. It starred my cat Muffin who magically transformed into a goat and then terrorized the neighborhood dogs. In junior high my mother took to calling me Harriet the Spy because I was always taking notes and listening in on the phone extensions. By high school I was working at the town public library, the local bookstore, editing the literary magazine, and taking creative writing classes at universities over the summer. I was also writing the essays for my friends' college applications!

As an English major at Tufts, I knew I wanted to write, but I wasn't sure if it would be books, magazines, or television. After graduation I moved to Los Angeles and tried my hand at different aspects of the entertainment industry. I worked for a literary agent, a television casting company, and became a script reader for a film producer. But it just didn't seem like the right fit at the time. I decided to go to graduate school to focus. Once I was there, I quickly realized that what I really wanted to do was to write for children and young adults. Those were the books that I loved growing up, the ones that I read over and over, the ones that still live inside me. I wanted to give something back to that especially difficult time in a young person's life. I moved back east and while writing on the side, began a career in publishing as a book editor at various houses in New York City and Connecticut. I co-created a teenage literary journal and continued filling notebooks with story ideas. The opportunity presented itself for me to write nonfiction, and I took it. Over the next six years I published eight books for teenagers on different educational topics. While this was rewarding, it was still fiction that made my heart beat the fastest. Needless to say, I was thrilled to hear that Little, Brown is publishing A MANGO-SHAPED SPACE in April, 2003.

Some of my favorite web sites: Greatergood.com, Hungersite.com (just a click a day sends food to hungry people), Amazon, Ebay, Internet Movie Database (imdb.com), The Onion, and Wheresgeorge.com (you enter the serial number of your dollar bills, stamp the web site info on the bill, then spend them and track where they wind up). Hampsterdance.com still makes me smile.

Favorite childhood books: THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, ARE YOU THERE GOD, IT'S ME MARGARET, all the books by Edward Eager and Beverly Cleary, the ENCYCLOPEDIA BROWN and DANNY DUNN BOOKS, THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH, and A BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA, which was the first book to make me cry. CHARLOTTE'S WEB was the second. As I got a little older: THE CAT ATE MY GYMSUIT, books by Paul Zindel, and my favorite—a novel called ALLEGRA MAUD GOLDMAN about a young girl who always knew exactly who she was. Now: Anything by Alice Hoffman, Robert Jordan, Ray Bradbury, Francesca Lia Block. Recent favorites: BEE SEASON, WHITE OLEANDER, HOTEL WORLD, and CARTER BEATS THE DEVIL.