Jackie French Koller has spent her life immersed in stories, listening as her mother read to her when she was a baby; conjuring up make-believe adventures to entertain herself; and developing a lifetime habit of avid reading. As a young mother, Koller found herself steeped in books again, this time for her infant daughter, Kerri. Like giving birth over and over again, the stories that Koller had inside her began emerging. "At first I wrote them for Kerri and the two little brothers who followed her, but gradually I began to share them with others, and people began to encourage me to try publication," Koller said in an interview with Diane Andreassi for Authors and Artists for Young Adults. Then after her youngest child was out of diapers Koller began attending writers' conferences where she learned her trade. Six years and hundreds of rejection slips later she began...