Glenda taught for many years in public and private schools. As an elementary school teacher, she taught pre-kindergarten through fifth grade. In middle school, she was a teacher of English and history. The highlight of her teaching career came in the historic year of 2008. That year, she and fellow teacher, Diane Tregarthen, took a class of 23 eighth graders on a five-day field trip from Los Angeles to the nation’s capital.
Glenda is the author of picture books and chapter books. She writes contemporary fiction, historical fiction and biographies. Her books are written in poetry and prose. Her stories have been (or will be) published by Lee & Low Books, Scholastic, Albert Whitman & Co., and Random House.
About Me
As a child, I loved to read and write. I wrote poems and stories about the Flintstones and talking butterflies and elephants. I wrote plays on scraps of paper and recruited my younger siblings to act in them. Later I learned that being a writer is an inherited trait.
My dad wrote over 200 beautifully-worded letters to his fiancée (my mother) when he was stationed in the Philippines during World War II.
My maternal grandmother kept a journal for many, many years, chronicling everything, from the mundane (a trip to Sears & Roebuck to buy earrings) to the profound (the day she and her family moved off of the Golden Star Plantation into their own home.)
My love of words led to a love of history when my sister, Faynessa, and I discovered the Declaration of Independence at the back of our family’s copy of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language. Fay and I made a game of reading the Declaration aloud and seeing how far we could get before stumbling over a word. Getting past “unalienable” was a major accomplishment. In spite of its multi-syllabic words, I learned the story, the good and the bad, of the Declaration and of the nation that it created.
When I was in the sixth grade, my teacher, Mrs. Cecil Randall Brown, had the class write their autobiographies. I wrote, “Ever since I can remember I have wanted to be a teacher and that is still what I hope to be.” I did become a teacher and enjoyed every minute of it. I could explore my love of children, teaching, learning, reading and writing, all while sharing those joys with children who are full of wonder and enthusiasm and curiosity.
I later became a school librarian and enjoyed the same delight and satisfaction that teaching gave me. All the while, I wrote stories and plays and poems for my family and my students.
