JoAnn Early Macken

Welcome to my web site! I write poetry, picture books, nonfiction, and novels for children and young adults.

My newest book, Flip, Float, Fly! Seeds on the Move, is a nonfiction picture book that describes the many ways seeds travel. Pam Paparone illustrated it, and Holiday House published it in 2008. My rhyming picture book Sing-Along Song, illustrated by LeUyen Pham, was published by Viking in 2004. The Texas Library Association chose Sing-Along Song for the 2005 Texas 2 x 2 Reading List. Candlewick will publish Waiting Out the Storm, a rhyming picture book in the form of a poem for two voices (a conversation between a mother and child), in spring 2010. Susan Gaber has created the gorgeous, perfect illustrations. My first picture book, Cats on Judy, was illustrated by Judith DuFour Love and published in 1997 by Whispering Coyote Press/Charlesbridge Publishing.

I am a graduate of the M.F.A. in Writing for Children and Young Adults Program at Vermont College. I visit schools to speak about poetry and writing. I received the Barbara Juster Esbensen 2000 Poetry Teaching Award for my work with a third grade class.

I've also written more than one hundred nonfiction books for school and library publishers. Gary Paulsen: Voice of Adventure and Survival, a biography of the author of Hatchet and many other amazing books for children, was published in 2007 as part of the Enslow Publishers series Authors Teens Love. Capstone Press published Construction Zone, a series of six books for beginning readers, in spring 2008. Two more books in the series were published in 2009. I've also written three science readers for Macmillan/McGraw-Hill and co-written twelve Easy Biographies for Scholastic.

My other series for beginning readers include Seasons of the Year, Animals That Live in the Mountains, Things with Wings, Where on Earth? World Geography, Animals That Live in the Desert, Water Habitats, Animals That Live in the Forest, After-School Fun, Animals That Live on the Farm, Let’s Read About Pets, People in My Community, Animals I See at the Zoo, and Animal Worlds.

My poems have been published in Cricket, Ladybug, Highlights for Children, and the anthology Stories from Where We Live: The Great Lakes. My article "Writing for the School and Library Market" appears in the 2006 Children's Writer's and Illustrator's Market. "Writing for Beginning Readers" appears in the 2008 edition, and "Fiction Inspired by Reality: Put Some Life in Your Work" appears in the 2009 edition. I also write test passages and classroom reading material for educational publishers and developers. (See a partial client list on the My Books page.)

I live in Wisconsin with my husband and our two sons. Besides writing, I enjoy reading, walking, gardening, canoing, and photography.