General Bio:
J.H. Diehl's novel Tiny Infinities is a Bank Street College of Education Best Children's Book of the Year, a Junior Library Guild Selection, and a Mighty Girl Book of the Year. Her picture books include Loon Chase, illustrated by Kathryn Freeman, and Three Little Beavers, illustrated by Cathy Morrison, and her short fiction has appeared in Indiana Review, Sycamore Review, Enhanced Gravity, Kestrel, and Bethesda Magazine, among others. She is the recipient of a Michener Fellowship, a Maryland Individual Artist Award, and was a finalist for an SCWBI Grant for a Contemporary Novel.
Jean Heilprin Diehl was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in the nearby suburbs, the setting for some of her fiction. She majored in English at Yale and started her career writing features and covering small towns and the cops and courts beat as a reporter for the Concord Monitor in Concord, N.H., where she also volunteered at NHPR as host of the Sunday night folk show. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and spent a decade living and working in Buenos Aires, Warsaw, and Jerusalem. Jean has taught fiction writing, literature and composition at the University of Iowa, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Montgomery College, and in high schools and elementary schools, and she is an SCBWI Creative Coaching Mentor. She's also worked as an EL content writer for Pearson, Kaplan, Trillium Publishing and others, producing literacy materials including leveled readers for Zaner-Bloser, Reading A-Z, and Scholastic. Jean and her husband have two children and live in Maryland.
For Gr2-8 Author Visits:
J.H. (Jean) Diehl was born in Washington, DC and grew up in Maryland. She learned to read and write in first grade, and was lucky that her teacher, Ms. Van Pool, was left-handed, too. In elementary school Jean's second-most favorite place was Little Falls Public Library. Her favorite place was her bed in her room at home where she read all the books she borrowed from the library. By sixth grade Jean knew she wanted to be a writer. That's when she “published” her first book, a collection of poems called “Poems About Nothing In Particular But Something." There were only three copies. But seeing them gave her a powerful feeling, because it was her voice speaking on the page, and nobody could change what she said since there her words were - printed.
Jean has been writing ever since. She’s been a newspaper reporter, a creator of materials that help kids learn to read, an English teacher, and a writing teacher. She’s lived in four states, Maryland, Iowa, Connecticut and New Hampshire, and five countries, the U.S., United Kingdom, Argentina, Poland, and Israel.
Her novel TINY INFINITIES was a Bank Street Best Book of the Year, Junior Library Guild Selection, and Mighty Girl Best Book of the Year. She is also the author of two picture books, LOON CHASE and THREE LITTLE BEAVERS. Jean and her husband have a son and a daughter and live in Maryland with their rescue dog, Wilson, about ten minutes from the house where she read all those books as a kid. Jean is always looking for more great reads. She hopes you’ll recommend a few of your favorites!