About the Author...

 Like her main character in Tending to Grace, Kimberly Newton Fusco has always been "...a bookworm, a bibliophile, a passionate lover of books." She grew up in Upton, Massachusetts, with her mother, father, sister, plus an assortment of animals. Her favorite reading spot was her tree house, and she spent hours there with piles of books. She’d walk to the library, a mile away, every few days to get a new supply. Her favorite books were Harriet the Spy, Island of the Blue Dolphins and Where the Red Fern Grows.

Kimberly knew she wanted to be a writer in the sixth grade. She never wanted to be anything else. She wrote for the literary magazine her church youth group started, “The Worm’s Eye View,” and then walked door-to-door selling it for twenty-five cents an issue. Her first nationally published work was an anti-Vietnam War poem.

To earn money for college, she packed hats at a hat factory, filled doughnuts with raspberry jelly at a doughnut shop, and washed dirty car batteries on an assembly line. This taught her that going to college makes a lot of sense.

At Roger Williams University, she fell in love with journalism. She was news editor for the student newspaper and then began writing campus news for the Providence (RI) Journal. She worked during vacations at the Milford (MA) Daily News, the Newport (RI) Daily News and the Boston Globe. She went to New York City and studied at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, the school that awards the Pulitzer Prizes. She worked as a stringer for the Providence Journal for a while after graduation and then went to work at the Worcester (MA) Telegram & Gazette, where she worked as an education writer and assignment editor and copy editor for 15 years. She received national reporting awards from the Education Writers Association in Washington, D.C., for two series of articles she wrote on poverty and its effects on education, and on ability grouping.

But fiction was always her dream and she left the newspaper business in 1998 to raise her four children and write. She joined the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, attended a writers group, and wrote every day. In 2002, she submitted ten pages of her novel to Alfred A. Knopf executive editor Michelle Frey. Michelle urged her to finish the novel. Kimberly did, and in seven months she wrote Tending to Grace.

In the book, 14-year-old Cornelia moves in with her great-aunt Agatha. Cornelia’s experience one day in a field of dandelions is a great way to describe what it feels like to be a published author:

“Very slowly, I begin to twirl around, first one way and then the other. I raise my arms, reaching up and pulling pieces of fluff into my hands. I breathe deeply and twirl faster, faster, and as I’m twirling, I’m laughing.”