Biography
Cole was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in nearby East Orange. She loved science as a child, and had a teacher she says was a little like Ms. Frizzle. She attended the University of Massachusetts and Indiana before graduating from the City College of New York with a B.A. in psychology. After some graduate education courses, she spent a year as a librarian in a Brooklyn elementary school. Cole subsequently became a letters correspondent at Newsweek, then associate editor for the SeeSaw book club at Scholastic, and then a senior editor for Doubleday Books for Young Readers. She went freelance in 1980, writing children's books and articles for Parents magazine. The first Magic School Bus book was written in 1985 and published the following year.
The Magic School Bus has enjoyed continued success and has sold millions of copies in multiple languages. The most recent installment in the series is The Magic School Bus and the Climate Challenge (2010). Joanna Cole has continued to write books on many subjects for a range of ages. She currently lives with her husband Philip in Norfolk.
Read more about this topic: Joanna Cole
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
—Richard Holmes (b. 1945)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)