Ann M. Martin

Ann Matthews Martin was born on August 12, 1955, and is an American author of children’s and young adult fiction. She is most famous for creating The Baby-Sitters Club series, which debuted in 1986. Martin graduated from Smith College, and her books have sold millions of copies globally. She remains active with The Baby-Sitters Club series and its spin-offs while also writing other novels.

Early life

Martin grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. Her mother, Eden, taught preschool, and her father, Henry, drew cartoons for The New Yorker and other magazines. On her mother’s side, her ancestry goes back to passengers on the Mayflower in 1620. She has a younger sister named Jane.

Martin became interested in writing early; before she could write, she dictated stories to her mother. As a child, she loved authors like Lewis Carroll, P. L. Travers, Hugh Lofting, Astrid Lindgren, and Roald Dahl. She enjoyed creative writing in elementary school and discovered her passion for it in second grade. She wrote short stories, and her fourth-grade teacher noted on her folder that she would become a wonderful writer because she spent so much free time writing in notebooks.

In middle and high school, her favorite subjects were English and French, while math was her least favorite. As a teenager, she liked working with children and decided to become a teacher. She wanted to help children with disabilities, so she spent summers at the Eden Institute, a school for autistic children in her hometown.

After graduating from Princeton High School in 1973, she attended Smith College from 1973 to 1977, studying early-childhood education and child psychology. Her senior thesis focused on using children’s literature in the classroom. She lived in Gardiner House and wrote for the college newspaper, The Sophian. Martin said Smith was “an environment of strong, independent women, both the students and the professors,” and her time there shaped her feminist identity and inspired her to create female characters like the women she knew.

Career

After college, Martin taught a combined fourth- and fifth-grade class at Plumfield School in Noroton, Connecticut. Her students, aged 8 to 13, had learning disabilities such as dyslexia and autism. She has said this work influenced her writing. After one year of teaching, she moved into publishing, rising from editorial assistant to senior editor at children’s book publishers like Pocket Books and Scholastic.

She now writes full-time. Her first book, Bummer Summer, came out in 1983 and won the Children’s Choice Award in 1985. She started writing The Baby-Sitters Club in 1985 while working as an editor at Scholastic.

After she wrote the first 35 novels in the series, Scholastic hired ghostwriters to continue it. In 2010, she published a prequel, The Summer Before. She now focuses on single novels, many set in the 1960s. One, A Corner of the Universe, earned a Newbery Honor in 2003.

In 2015, she won the Josette Frank Award for Rain Reign, sharing it with I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson. That book was also named a Best Children’s Book of the Year with Outstanding Merit; other Martin books on that list include A Corner of the Universe, Here Today, Friends, A Dog’s Life, Ten Good and Bad Things About My Life (So Far), and Better to Wish. Martin gets ideas from personal experiences, childhood memories, and contemporary problems.

Her characters are fictional, though some are based on or named after real people. In 1990, she and colleagues founded “The Lisa Libraries” to honor their friend Lisa Novak, a nonprofit that gives new books to children and sets up libraries in underserved areas. That same year, she started the Ann M. Martin Foundation, which supports art, education, literacy, and programs for abused and stray animals. Martin served as a producer for the 2020 Netflix adaptation of The Baby-Sitters Club.

Personal life

Martin keeps a quiet public profile. She lived in New York City for many years before moving to the Hudson Valley, where she enjoys nature, sewing, and fostering kittens. She posts on social media, including her public Facebook page, and continues to make author appearances and oversee adaptations of her work, such as graphic novels and TV series versions of The Baby-Sitters Club. In 2016, she revealed that she had previously been in a relationship with Laura Godwin, with whom she wrote the four books in The Doll People series.