Bio » About Melissa Glenn Haber
Melissa Glenn Haber was born in Berkeley, California, in 1969, and has been writing since about 1973. Her childhood was just unhappy enough to give her something to write about later, and several miserable, friendless years before things got better gave her ample time to read and reread and rereread many great works of children’s literature.
After high school, where she met her husband Ezra, Melissa went on to study world religions at Harvard–Radcliffe college, and then floundered around in various careers (teacher, graduate student, public policy analyst, different kind of graduate student, teacher) before chucking it all up for motherhood and writing for twelve years. She wrote her first book while her infant daughter slept in a stroller. (It still lives in the bottom drawer of her bedside table because it’s terrible.) She wrote her second novel, The Heroic Adventure of Hercules Amsterdam while her daughter was in preschool and twin sons napped in their doublewide, and when it was finished her husband forced her to try and get it published. Sixteen rejection letters from agents later, she had the great good fortune to sell the manuscript to Dutton Children’s Books, through a connection made at that same high school where she met her husband—which just goes to prove you should always be nice to people, so they’ll want to help you out later. (Really.) Three other novels have followed: Beyond the Dragon Portal (Dutton, 2005); The Pluto Project (Dutton, 2006), and Dear Anjali (Aladdin, 2010).
Since 2008, Melissa has been combining the high job satisfaction, low hourly wage, and fear of failure that come with writing along with the high job satisfaction, low hourly wage, and fear of failure that come with being a high school history teacher—back at the same high school where she met her husband. She still writes, because she has given up sleeping. She and her family live in Somerville, Massachusetts, not far from where the first American flag was flown on January 1st, 1776.