Dia Calhoun's life provides material for her award-winning tales, from carvings on her bedpost to her love affair with ballet. Born January 4, 1959, in Seattle, Washington, to James and Eva Alaire Calhoun, a small business owner and homemaker respectively, Calhoun studied ballet from the age of five to seventeen, but, even as a child in second grade, she knew she wanted some day to be a writer.

With the encouragement of her parents to try anything creative, and at the urging of her second grade teacher, Muriel Kennedy, to explore writing, Calhoun took the first tentative steps toward her future. Her first efforts at poetry—the passion of her teacher—led to a poem in fifth grade entitled "Our Classroom Flag" that was "truly terrible," as Calhoun candidly admits on the Winslow Press Web site, "but it rhymed!"

Calhoun continued to explore reading...