Sarah C. Campbell is an award-winning author and photo-illustrator. Her critically-acclaimed first book, Wolfsnail: A Backyard Predator (Boyds Mills Press), was named a 2009 Theodor Seuss Geisel Honor Book and made the Cooperative Children's Book Center's 2009 Choices List. Her newest book, Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature, was published in March 2010. Her writing and photographs have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Highlights for Children, and Highlights' High Five.
In addition to her own creative work, Campbell has been: artist-in-residence at Davis Magnet School in Jackson, Miss; faculty member at "Writing From Nature: Blazing a Trail from Field Journal to Publication" (a Highlights Foundation Founders Workshop); presenter at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science's Young Naturalists Camp; and instructor of journalism at Millsaps College.
Sarah started writing as a child to try to make sense of the world -- and she's still at it. She still has a copy of her first story, "The Eight Balls," which she uses to encourage young writers to keep writing even if they haven't mastered all the conventions of the English language.
Sarah was born near Chicago, but moved to rural Mississippi when she was in the second grade. Her first published piece was a letter to the editor she wrote in the seventh grade, asking why public school track teams had not been invited to the annual Lions Club track meet. This prompted several meetings of the town's fathers, but no meeting of public and private school athletes on the track.
In high school, she wrote about and photographed her school's sports teams for the local newspaper, thereby equalizing treatment between the public high school and the local private academy. At Northwestern, Sarah worked in the back shop at the Daily Northwestern, where she learned to typeset and paste-up advertisements. (Though these skills quickly became obsolete, she learned things about layout and design that she still uses today.) After graduating from Northwestern University with undergraduate and graduate degrees in journalism, she went to Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship. She studied politics, philosophy, and economics, learned to row, and met her husband, Richard.
After Oxford, Sarah and Richard settled in Jackson, Mississippi, where Sarah wrote for newspapers and later taught journalism. When her third son was a year old (in 1999), Sarah began to write stories for children. Sarah and Richard have three sons.
