Donna Gephart’s first novel, As If Being 12 ¾ Isn’t Bad Enough, My Mother is Running For President!, was the recipient of the 2009 Sid Fleischman Humor Award. When she reflects on what drew her to humor, she recalls, “The big family dinners where my aunts and uncles and cousins and everybody would be sitting around the table laughing our heads off and telling stories and pigging out.” She also read the humor columnist Erma Bombeck, as a kid—even though Bombeck’s column was written for a more mature audience. “I was interested in humor even back then,” she says.
Somewhere between the ages of eight and ten, her mother made a fuss over something she had written and Gephart knew she wanted to be a writer. However, the path to writing for children was long and circuitous, with stops at writing greeting cards, magazine articles, and short stories. Gephart had always enjoyed reading children’s books to her two sons, but when they began to veer away from the children’s section, she stayed. More…
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