About Angela
Angela is a recovering academic who still maintains a geeky enthusiasm for science and an abiding love of good footnotes. She works as a freelance web designer and writer, but kidlit is her passion.
Her academic past and kidlit love have merged in her forthcoming picture book series, The Little Elephants’ Big Adventures, which follows the escapades of brother and sister elephants, Lucy and Benjamin, along with their stuffed Bear who is inanimate (but don’t tell Benjamin and Lucy.) The project is a collaboration with early education researchers at Purdue University to incorporate their research on early math learning into engaging picture books for classroom and home use.
She also has two Orthodox board books, Goodnight Jesus and I Pray Today (Ancient Faith Press, 2016 and 2018, respectively).
She lives in the Central Illinois flatlands with her husband, two kids, and too many pets.
Longer Bio
Angela was born in Louisville, Kentucky with straight hair and great vision. People who know her now find this highly unlikely, so she shows them this picture as proof.
But that all changed around first grade. Her hair began to curl and one day the blackboard went blurry and stayed that way. She had four eye surgeries. (One was an emergency surgery on Christmas eve!) Her vision was saved, but she had to wear really thick glasses.
She also had to repeat first grade because of something called “socio-emotional development” which is another way of saying: it’s hard to be a first grader and sometimes you need more practice.
By fourth grade, Angela had big curly hair to match her big bifocals. She spent her time making things, reading books, and playing the violin.
In sixth grade she got contacts. She was extremely thankful.
Angela still loved making things, reading books, and playing the violin through her teen years. She spent a lot of her class time in high school drawing comics and writing stories, poems, and really bad songs. (She kept her grades up, so the teachers looked the other way.) After school she taught herself to make websites so she could post her writing online. She also decided to become a Psychologist after reading a college textbook one summer when she was bored between sewing projects.
In college she did study Psychology, but also took a lot of computer science classes and worked in a hand weaving studio. Then she moved to Central Illinois, so she could continue studying the Psychology of Language but frequently got distracted planting gardens, building websites, and doing crafts.
Five years later, she finally realized that while Psychology was interesting, she really wanted to spend her life being creative. She dropped out of her PhD program with an MA and ABD and began writing. She hasn’t stopped.
