Brenda A. Ferber

Ferber was born Brenda Gail Aaronson in Skokie, Illinois, on April 23, 1967. She grew up in Highland Park, Illinois, where her father practiced medicine and her mother, an artist, taught art. In 1990, she married Alan D. Ferber, whom she had met in college.

Ferber discovered Judy Blume's books in elementary school and decided right then to become a children's book author, too—a dream that took some years to realize. After college and while raising three children, Brenda found being around kids and books reignited her old writing fantasy. She determined to give it a shot no matter how bad the odds of success were. When she took her first formal writing class, she had three toddlers at home. She hired a sitter so she could have a few precious hours each week in which to write.

She started out writing stories that were accepted by Ladybug magazine and several picture book manuscripts that collected 130 rejection letters over the course of three years. She immersed herself in children's fiction at the local library and decided she wanted to write novels that could touch a child's heart and soul and signed up for an advanced novel writing class to help push her to fulfill her dream.

In 2004, she submitted her first novel, then called Cara's Kitchen, to the Sydney Taylor Manuscript Competition, which she won.[1] The manuscript was accepted for publication by Farrar Straus & Giroux, which published the book as Julia's Kitchen in 2006.

Ferber lives in Deerfield, Illinois, with her husband, three children, and a mini-whoodle named Ozzy.

• "A Cheer for Charlie" - Ladybug, June 2006
• "The One with the Freckle" - Ladybug, September 2006

• Official site
• Publisher's site
• Author's blog: "Fresh Baked Bits"
• Presentation of the 2004 Sydney Taylor Manuscript Award Archived 2012-02-17 at the Wayback Machine
• Sydney Taylor Manuscript Award Acceptance Speech