Cynthia Lord is a children's author. Lord's debut novel Rules was published by Scholastic, Inc. in 2006, and was a 2007 Newbery Honor book and winner of the Schneider Family Book Award.

She was born in New Hampshire and currently lives in Maine.

Beginning/Childhood:Cynthia Lord’s life as a writer began at age four with a song collaboration with her sister. The song was called “Ding Dong the Cherries Sing,” and they forced anyone within a 12-mile radius to listen to them sing it, over and over and over. Lord says that she was a day dreamer, a shy child, and she will always be grateful for the time and room that her parents gave her to be by herself. Lord’s favorite books when she was very young included Happy, Peppermint, Fantastic Mr. Fox and Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne.Lord grew up in rural New Hampshire beside a lake. Lord had a dog named Peanut, who listened to Lord’s stories and all of her secrets.Her best friend was bally she met him in collageCollege & After:In college Lord had some short stories published, and even won a contest with one!After college Lord got married and became a teacher. As her children grew up, she returned to writing fiction. Now she gets up most mornings between 3:30 and 4:00 A. M. and tiptoes through the dark and sits at her desk. Lord says that: That’s my just-me time to open my heart and spill it across the white pages.Lord says that she still loves watching words jump onto the page, and she still loves making people laugh and cry and shiver with her writing. She still loves to read a great story. Lord still has kept HAPPY and PEPPERMINT and FANTASTIC MR. FOX and WINNIE THE POOH all of these years. She keeps them to remind her of the child she used to be, the one who liked surfboarding toads, sang the cherry song, and scared herself silly writing her first ghost story. She’s the one she writes for.

Present:Cynthia Lord lives in an old house with her husband. She has an office and on her desk she keeps a dictionary, a grammar book, books of photographs, a field guide of animals and plants, and other reference books, as well as objects and pictures of her settings.On top of her computer she keeps an object from every book she’s written. She even has a fortune from a fortune cookie stuck on the front of her monitor that says: “Your talents will be recognized and suitably rewarded.” She also has a quote by Aristotle,“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”Lord says that the quote reminds her to keep writing everyday, even when she doesn’t feel motivated. Lord says that some of her best writing comes from the days that she does not feel especially inspired.

Interviews:If you would like to read some interviews that Cynthia Lord has done:http://cynthialord.com/interviews.html

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