Ann (Feis) Rinaldi was born on August 27, 1934, in New York City.

She attended high school in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She married Ronald Rinaldi in 1960, with whom she has two children, a boy and a girl. A writer since her youth, Rinaldi created stories even while she was, as she states, "house bound" with her babies.

Her first published young adult novel, Term Paper, began as a ten-thousandword short story about a fourteen-yearold protagonist. That, plus her next two novels, fall under the category of contemporary realistic fiction. The works deal with such modern issues as peer pressure, teen dating, birth control, and a girl's search for identity.

When Rinaldi completed But in the Fall I'm Leaving, a moving story about a fourteen-year-old girl who must choose between living with her busy newspaperman father or a mother she has never really known, Rinaldi herself...