Going Where It's Dark (30 page)

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
has always been interested in things underground and under the sea, as well as out-of-the-way places and the different choices people make in their lives. She is the author of more than 140 books, including the Newbery Medal winner
Shiloh,
and the companion,
A Shiloh Christmas;
Faith, Hope, and Ivy June; Emily's Fortune; Emily and Jackson Hiding Out;
and the Boy/Girl Battle series, which begins with
The Boys Start the War
and
The Girls Get Even.

When her husband, Rex, was alive, he was the first person to read her manuscripts. As a former supervisor of speech pathology at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Washington, DC, and a chief of speech pathology at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, he devised special programs for people who stutter, but his personality was quite the opposite of that of Jacob Wall from this story.

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland. She is the mother of two grown sons and the grandmother of Sophia, Tressa, Garrett, and Beckett.