An Interview with Author Donna Gephart

Celebrating Day 2 of Darcy Pattison's Random Acts of Publicity.

Gephart: Embracing her inner nerd.

I met Donna Gephart through a lucky accident: We were stuck in line for a bus at last year’s SCBWI-Florida conference. Which was my great good fortune, since she invited me to come to the monthly SCBWI critique group she co-hosts in Palm Beach Gardens (the group just celebrated its seventh anniversary). Donna has made her mark with gut-bustingly funny middle grade novels about smart, quirky kids; her newest book, Olivia Bean, Trivia Queen, about a girl determined to get on the TV quiz show Jeopardy!, comes out in March from Delacorte Press/Random House (pre-order it at Amazon and Barnes and Noble).  Her most recent novel, How to Survive Middle School, received a starred review from Kirkus and School Library Journal (click here for the singing hamster video).  Her first book, As If Being 12-3/4 Isn't Bad Enough, My Mother Is Running for President won the Sid Fleischman Humor Award. Visit Donna at http://www.donnagephart.com, where you'll also find out she makes a mean lemon square and apple cake.

Questions for Donna Gephart:

Four Must-Read Writing Books

I feel like I've read 150 books on the craft of writing this year; in my nightmares I'm stumbling through a Dickensian fog of them, pages piling around me in drifts. All offer useful tips and tricks -- never do I close the book (or hurl it across the room, or weep over its pages) without at least a few takeaways. But a handful  stand out as books that have changed the way I see the world; they're books that have sent me back for my 5th-plus revision on my work-in-progress with joy in my heart rather than dread. On occasion they speak to something that I feel I knew deeply all along but failed to recognize consciously until that "ah-ha" moment on page, say, 57. And the really great ones have lifted me, have made me feel I'm capable of more than I rightly ought to be. Here they are, in no particular order: