About Amy

Amy MacDonald is the author of fifteen books for elementary and middle-school aged children. They include Little Beaver and the Echo, Rachel Fister’s Blister, and No More Nice.

Now a resident of Maine, she says the outdoors always played an important role in her life. “When I wasn’t messing about on the beach in Beverly, Massachusetts, where I grew up,” she says, “my favorite place to be, as a child, was a little cabin on a remote pond in the woods of New Hampshire.”

The pond where Amy wrote Little Beaver and The Echo

“Here my two sisters and brother and I spent every weekend and most of our summers. There were no neighbors, no other kids, no TV or telephone, in fact, no real running water. We found our entertainment in the woods, and on the pond: fishing, swimming, canoeing, sailing, skating. We still own that little cabin, and it is still an important place for me. It’s where I wrote my first children’s book, Little Beaver and the Echo. It’s where I go to write most of my books.”

These books have won worldwide acclaim: translated into 28 languages, they’ve topped the “Best Children’s Book” lists in three countries (including Horn Book, Parents Magazine, and the London Independent), been listed on a dozen state Children’s Choice Award lists, and won or been short-listed for many major awards (Parents Choice Award, the Silver Stylus, Kate Greenaway, the Children’s Book Award, Oppenheim Platinum Award). Little Beaver and the Echo was also chosen one of the Ten Best Children’s Books of the Year by the New York Times.

Documentary “On This Island” screened on PBS’s Independent Lens Series

She has also worked as an editor and a freelance writer, in the U.S., France and England. Her non-fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, the Times (London), and many magazines. Her documentary film, “On This Island”, about the role of arts in Maine’s smallest, island school, earned a New England Emmy nomination and was screened on national television (PBS’s Independent Lens series).

Amy has taught creative writing and non-fiction to all ages, from kindergarten to students at University of Maine at Farmington, the Stonecoast Writers Conference, and Harvard University.

She has given school presentations and writing workshops in thirty states, as well as in Europe and Africa. As a Teaching Artist for the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts’ national Partners in Education program, she has been conducting professional development writing workshops for K-12 teachers across the country since 1998.

Her other books include A Very Young Housewife, Rachel Fister’s Blister, Cousin Ruth’s Tooth, No More Nice, No More Nasty, Please Malese!, The Spider Who Created the World, and Quentin Fenton Herter III.