Holly Hughes
Reading and writing have been lifelong passions for Holly Hughes, author of American Girl's History Mystery Hoofbeats of Danger. At age 31/2 she taught herself to read, and over the years, she filled many spiral notebooks with stories. "I have always been a book lover," she says, "and writing always went hand in hand with reading. Even now, the prospect of a clean notebook is exciting to me."
Growing up in Indiana, Hughes and her family headed in many directions on their annual two-week car vacations. "Often our trips were to historical landmarks," she remembers. "We visited Civil War battlefields in Mississippi, explored Fort Ticonderoga in upper New York State, walked the Freedom Trail in Boston, and stared down into the Grand Canyon." Hughes's childhood experiences gave her a great sense of American distances and unfolding landscapes. They also gave her the idea for Hoofbeats of Danger, which tells the story of Annie Dawson, a young girl living on the Red Buttes Pony Express Station in 1860. Hughes explains, "I was attracted to the reckless courage of the Pony Express enterprise, with lone riders galloping for miles through virtually unsettled wilderness."
Hughes studied creative writing at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, then went on to earn a bachelor's degree in English language and literature from Oxford University in England. For several years she worked at Scholastic, Inc., as a staff writer and editor for Scope, a language arts magazine for sixth to eighth graders, and as a contributing editor to Literary Cavalcade. More recently, she cowrote a series for girls called The Spellcasters. She is the author of Frommer's What to Do with Kids in New York City and a nonfiction book for adults, The Reading Group Book, coauthored with David Laskin.
Hughes lives in New York City with her husband and three children. She is currently working on another History Mysteries book and a time travel series for young readers entitled The Clockspinners.
Updated 1999
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