Sharon Creech was born into a "noisy and rowdy" family on July 29th in South Euclid, Ohio. She took a car trip every summer with her mom and dad, one sister, and three brothers. They would all pile into the car and head out on their adventures. One summer they traveled to Idaho, a trip that influenced Creech's Newbery Medal book Walk Two Moons. Creech became interested in writing when she was in college and taking literature and writing classes. Later, when she was teaching high school English and writing in England and Switzerland, she wrote two books for adults that were published in England. Her first book about young people was Absolutely Normal Chaos, a fictionalization of her own family—the boys have the same names as her own brothers. Creech draws on her own life, experiences, and people she's met to create her novels. She says, "Many ideas in Walk Two Moons came from a single fortune cookie message: Don't judge a man until you've walked two moons in his moccasins." One of her most recent books, Ruby Holler, just won the 2002 Carnegie Medal. She is the first American to win this award. Creech is married to Lyle Rigg, headmaster of The Pennington School in Pennington, N.J. They have two grown children, Rob and Karin.
