Elizabeth Falk is the author of three published works: Freedom’s Fire, Lettie’s North Star, and Council Fire. She is the president of RACWI (Rochester Area Children’s Writers and Illustrators), and she is the Director of the Rochester Children’s Book Festival held annually at Monroe Community College in Rochester, NY.

I grew up in upstate New York near beautiful Owasco Lake. My summers were filled with swimming, skiing and sailing. But on rainy days or on all those snowy winter days, there was only one thing I wanted to do: read.

I read when I was supposed to be setting the table, when I was supposed to be cleaning my room, and I even got in trouble for reading at school! There’s something really wrong with that one! At bedtime I was allowed just ten minutes to read so I got really good at reading under the covers by flashlight. As crimes go, it wasn’t a very big one.

If I wasn’t reading, I was writing. Lists, poems, letters, stories, and pages and pages in my diary. When I became a teacher I read to the students in my classroom. They loved listening to me read because I use lots of different voices for the different characters. When I became a mom I had the sheer joy of reading to my three babies – everything from Pat the Bunny to all of Roald Dahl’s books. For me, a day without at least a little bit of reading and writing is just not a very good day.

In the back row are writers Andrea Page, Vivian VandeVelde and Elizabeth Falk. In the front row are Newbery winner Linda Sue Park for A Single Shard and double Newbery winner Lois Lowry for The Giver and for Number the Stars.

Back row: children's authors Marsha Hayles, Suzanne Bloom, me, Cat Bowman Smith. Front row: MJ Auch and Vivian VandeVelde