Stephanie Tolan currently lives in Charlotte, NC, with her husband. Her experiences with these 'amazing, off-the-charts' young people inspired the themes of Welcome to the Ark, a powerful novel about four brilliant young misfits in a world teetering on destruction. She lectures throughout the country to audiences of parents, educators and counselors attempting to find ways to meet the children's needs. She co-authored the award-winning nonfiction book, Guiding the Gifted Child, and has written many articles about the challenges gifted 'asynchronous' children and adults face as they find a way to fit into their world.

Stephanie Tolan is also well known as an advocate for extremely bright children. Her writing for children and young adults, beginning with Grandpa - And Me in 1978, has reflected that contemporary world. The difference, she felt, was less in the children themselves than in the fast-changing world they lived in.

'They brought back to me that special reading joy that most adults, even the readers among us, have lost, and I wanted to try my hand at writing for those kids, so like myself at their age and yet so different.' Her first group of students were fourth and fifth graders, and she found among them a new generation of intense readers, still using the flashlight-under-the-covers trick. In the mid-seventies, Stephanie began working in the Poets-in-the-Schools program in Pennsylvania. Marriage and the sudden addition to her life of three young stepsons, and then a son, forced writing into the nooks and crannies, but she wrote poetry and plays for adults as she taught college English. Other ambitions came and went, but writing stayed on, and she majored in creative writing at Purdue University, then went on to a Master's Degree in English.

It was thrilling to discover she could make the magic herself, and she decided then and there to be a writer. Born in Ohio and raised in Wisconsin, she wrote her first story in the fourth grade. She always thought there was a special magic in the little black marks on paper that could turn into whole worlds and real people. Those that were read to her and those she read to herself, often late at night with a flashlight under the covers.

Surviving the apple whites