Margaret Peterson Haddix claims that from childhood she always thought that becoming a storyteller would be the "grandest thing in the world." The daughter of a farmer and a nurse, she was born April 9, 1964 in Washington Courthouse, Ohio. Haddix grew up on a steady diet of stories, both her father's family stories and the ones she read in books. As early as high school, Haddix knew that she did not want to just tell stories; she wanted to write them.

After attending Miami University and majoring in journalism, creative writing, and history, she got jobs at newspapers as a copy editor and a reporter which enabled her to write stories about real events. All the time, though, she continued to pursue her creative writing, working on short stories. Soon, she found that working as a fulltime journalist did not allow her enough time to...