The Author Project
I was 17 when I went out with my first boyfriend and received my first kiss, just like Reed Walton, my main character in THE GIRLFRIEND PROJECT.
We also both grew up in Jersey and worked in public libraries.
But I was born in Israel and came to the U.S. when I was five.
I didn’t have “writing role models” when I was growing up, so I didn’t know people who liked to write could become writers. I thought people who liked to write became reporters.
In high school, I wrote for THE HITCHING POST, and at Rutgers University, THE DAILY TARGUM became my life. During the summers, I had internships at the FREEHOLD TRANSCRIPT, RED BANK REGISTER, and ASBURY PARK PRESS.
But after I graduated from Rutgers, I’d overloaded and had enough of journalism. So, I got a job as an editor at Princeton University, where I copy-edited a molecular biology journal while earning a master’s degree in education from Rutgers University.
Princeton was a wonderful place to work, but molecular biology was not what I had in mind.
So I went to law school! But, even though I got an A in Contracts, an A- in Legal Writing, and made the dean’s list at Temple University School of Law in Philadelphia, I knew law wasn’t for me either.
Back to being an editor, this time, in the children’s books department at Walker and Company, a publishing house in New York City. It was here I finally found “writing role models” — regular people like me who wrote manuscripts and submitted them for publication.
And in one of those plot twists, THE GIRLFRIEND PROJECT is being published by Walker, with my wonderful old boss as my wonderful new editor!
