Ann Rinaldi was born on August 27, 1934, to Michael and Marcella Feis.

She attended high school in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and in 1960, married Ronald P. Rinaldi. Although her father, who was a newspaperman, had always discouraged her writing, she wanted to be a novelist, and started out by writing four novels, which according to her own statement, were terrible. Still determined to become a writer, in 1969 she was assigned a weekly column in the local newspaper, the Somerset Gazette. Encouraged, she syndicated her column in various New Jersey papers, but her final breakthrough came when the Trentonian hired her to write two columns a week. Soon she was writing feature stories. In 1978, she won the New Jersey Press Award and returned to her earlier love of fiction, selling her first short story.

Drawing on her experiences as a parent of two teen-age children, she...