the official bio

Martine Leavitt is the author of award-winning books for young readers, including Calvin (winner of the Governor General's Award), My Book of Life by Angel (finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and winner of the Canadian Library Association Young Adult Book of the Year) and Keturah and Lord Death (finalist for the National Book Award). She teaches in the MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she is serving as the Katherine Paterson Endowed Chair. Martine lives in High River, Alberta.


the unofficial bio

  • I was born in Taber, Alberta but...
  • I am also an American citizen by right of birth.
  • My father was in the military, so we moved many times. Which meant...
  • I was always the new kid in school, and between that and being socially awkward...
  • I had a deliciously unhappy childhood, which is propitious for writers for young people.
  • I have lived in the lovely small town of High River, Alberta, for 36 years.
  • Yes, it floods in High River. And more particularly in our basement.
  • I became a single parent of six children after my first book was published.
  • I had no way to support my children, having nothing beyond a high school education...
  • and the local slaughterhouse wouldn't hire me...
  • so I went to the University of Calgary and got, impractically, an English degree. It made me happy.
  • I remarried the same year I graduated, to sweet husband Greg Leavitt.
  • We had a seventh child together. Yes, a miracle, given my geriatric reproductive system.
  • I graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College in 2003.
  • After working as an editor in the marketing department of SMART Technologies for five years, I joined the faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts in January 2008.
  • I have been blessed to work with so many talented emerging writers at VCFA, coming up on fifteen years now.
  • I have twenty grandchildren, with possibility for more. I have achieved genetic immortality. This may or may not be a good thing.
  • Somewhere in there I wrote books...