Sandy Asher
Sandy Asher started out as an adult's author before settling into children's literature. She was born in 1942 and raised in Philadelphia, taking an interest in theater through her scriptwriting for WFIU-Radio's "Indiana School of the Sky" as well as her short stint as a drama critic for The Spectator. Dabbling in dance and acting finally led her to authorship of novels and plays, as well as some poems and stories for magazines.
In regards to the journey of her career, she has told the Dictionary of Literary Biography:
[A]ccepted or rejected, I am still one of the luckiest people in the world, because I get to do something I love doing every single day of my life, and very few people have that privilege.
At the time this article was published, Asher had only ever written one protagonist who was male. One of her goals was to portray sturdy friendships between women and girls the same way many classic duos of men are given attention in mainstream media. In addition to a feminist outlook, tackling neglected themes has been her trademark, to which she has said:
Knowing how vital a part I may play in some young person's life, I feel a heavy responsibility to be careful about what I say and how I say it. I'm not talking about censorship of my words and ideas, but of thoughtfulness. What do I really think about things and what do I want to tell the next generation?
The rest of her philosophy on being a children's literature author is in the quotes to follow, all also recorded by the DLB.
I am often asked, 'Why do you write for children?' Or, more commonly, 'How come you write for children?' (asked as if to say, 'How come you write for Martians?' or 'How come you write for chimpanzees?') with the very clear implication that children are not quite human somehow, certainly not as human as adults, and that therefore their books are not quite real books.
The best children's literature speaks not only to children but to the human condition. Writing for children simply means writing for human beings at the beginning, before habit and cynicism have set in, and while there is still hope and energy and a healthy sense of humor—all qualities I want to hang onto as I age. So I write for children for their sakes, and for my own.
While Sandy Asher was one of the six authors to be invited to the first Children's Literature Festival, she was also a dinner speaker for the festival in 1991. Her speech was called, "Power to the Young People: Reading, Writing, and Self-Esteem."