Lois Lowry

Lois Lowry (born March 20, 1937) is an author from the United States. She was born in Hawaii to an army family, who named her "Sena" for her Norwegian grandmother; hearing of this, her grandmother telegraphed and instructed her parents that the child should have an American name. Lois was a solitary child who lived in the world of books and her own vivid imagination. Because her father was a career military officer—an Army dentist—she lived all over the world. Born in Hawaii, she moved from there to New York, spent the years of WWII in Carlisle, Pennsylvania (her mother's hometown), and from there went to Tokyo when she was eleven. High school was back in New York City, but by the time she went to college at Brown University in Rhode Island, her family was living in Washington, D.C.

At age nineteen, Lois married a Naval officer and continued the odyssey that military life requires: California; Connecticut (a daughter was born there); Florida (a son); South Carolina; Cambridge, Massachusetts, where her husband left the service and entered Harvard Law School (there they had another daughter and another son) and finally to Maine—by then with four children under the age of five in tow. Lois then returned to college at the University of Southern Maine, got her degree, went to graduate school, and finally began to write professionally—the thing she'd dreamed of doing since those childhood years when she had endlessly scribbled stories and poems in notebooks.

Lois currently resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts, living and writing in a house dominated by a very shaggy Tibetan Terrier named Bandit. Her books have varied in content and style. Yet it seems that all of them deal, essentially, with the same general theme: the importance of human connections.