Longer (and More Exciting!) Bio

I am a mom, librarian, and writer living in my hometown of San Francisco. My husband, Alex, and I have two kids, Everett (19) and Cate (16). Here we are picking apples (one of my favorite activities!):

I was born in Scotland, grew up in San Francisco, and have lived in New York, Santa Barbara, and Paris. When I was in the fourth grade, my family moved to a tiny village in the French Alps for a year. I learned to speak French there! Now I’m back home in San Francisco, living a block away from my childhood house.

I went to college at the University of California at Davis, where I studied French. After that I earned a master’s degree in French literature from UC Santa Barbara, studied abroad in Toulouse, France, spent a year teaching English in Paris, then worked in publishing in New York for four years before returning home to the West Coast

My neighborhood in San Francisco feels a bit like a village, where you can’t walk down the street to the post office without running into five neighbors, your kids’ kindergarten teacher, and the grocery store butcher on his day off. I love belonging to this community, and I find that a sense of place and setting infuses much of my writing.

My first picture book, Journey: Based on the True Story of OR7, the Most Famous Wolf in the West, was published by Little Bigfoot Books in 2016. Journey was featured on NPR and the Huffington Post and is the winner of Bank Street College’s Cook Prize and Northland College’s SONWA award, as well as a finalist for SCBWI’s Crystal Kite award and for the Washington State Book Awards.

My other books include the Maddy McGuire, CEO chapter books (2018), To Live on an Island (2019), the Gavin McNally’s Year Off chapter books (2019), The Pig War: How a Porcine Tragedy Taught England and America to Share (2020), Odin: Dog Hero of the Fires (2020), and Claude: The True Story of a White Alligator (2020).

In 2022 I welcomed three more picture book biographies: The Gardener of Alcatraz: A True Story, Mr. McCloskey’s Marvelous Mallards: The Making of Make Way for Ducklings, and How Science Saved the Eiffel Tower.

The Fabulous Fannie Farmer: Kitchen Scientist and America’s Cook came out in January 2024.

(See more on the Books page.)

Formerly a French teacher and magazine editor, today I work part-time as a public librarian and fill the rest of my days walking our dog, failing to help with high school math homework, protecting my lettuce from the slugs, watching British murder mysteries, and organizing the books in my Little Free Library.

Let’s talk favorite books!

Some of my favorite picture books, and ones that contributed to me becoming an author: Extra Yarn, by Mac Barnett; A Good Day, by Kevin Henkes; Blueberries for Sal, by Robert McCloskey; Library Lion, by Michelle Knudsen; and All the World, by Liz Garton Scanlon.

Books I loved as a child and teen, that I read many times over, include the Little House and Anne of Green Gables series, the Gerald Durrell Corfu memoirs (My Family and Other Animals), the All Creatures Great and Small novels, A Room with a View, Cress Delahanty, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, and Carry on Mr. Bowditch. I also loved Willa Cather, Herman Wouk, Jane Austen, and Rumor Godden. On a less literary note, I devoured the Choose Your Own Adventure books, anything by Enid Blyton, and the Tintin and Asterix comics!

I am represented by Storm Literary Agency. Contact me directly at emmasmithsf [at] yahoo.com.