Ann Angel

Ann Angel believes it was amazing fortune that brought Janis Joplin’s music and style into her life when, as a teen, she preferred writing bad poetry and drawing while listening to Janis’ music over following along with the popular girls. It was that same influence that encouraged Ann to live her own life without compromise. Ann’s biography, Janis Joplin: Rise Up Singing won the American Library Association’s 2011 YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award, the 2011 Council for Wisconsin Writers Book-length nonfiction award, and the 2011 SCBWI Crystal Kite Award. It has also been listed as a CCBC 2011 Choices book.

Ann has written many other young adult biographies. She also served as contributing editor for the highly acclaimed Such a Pretty Face: Short Stories About Beauty, has a number of short stories in anthologies, and is working on young adult fiction. Most recently, Ann and her daughter Amanda Angel co-edited Silent Embrace: Perspectives on Birth and Adoption, a collection of literary essays addressed to birth parents and searching adoptees.

A graduate of Vermont College’s MFA in writing for children and young adults, Ann lives in Wisconsin with her family and teaches creative writing at Mount Mary College in Milwaukee.




			Janis Joplin: Rise Up Singing Amulet Books, 2010 young adult, ISBN 978-0810983496 Forty years after her death, Janis Joplin remains among the most compelling and influential figures in rock-and-roll history. Her story—told here with depth and sensitivity by author Ann Angel—is one of a girl who struggled against rules and limitations, yet worked diligently to improve as a singer. It’s the story of an outrageous rebel who wanted to be loved, and of a wild woman who wrote long, loving letters to her mom. And finally, it’s the story of one of the most iconic female musicians in American history, who died at twenty-seven.



			A Reader's Guide to The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros Enslow Publishers, 2010 young adult, ISBN 978-0-7660-3167-8 Sandra Cisneros has overcome many hardships, including poverty and racism, to become a unique voice of Mexican-American literature. Her first novel, The House on Mango Street, was written so that everyone who picked it up would be able to read it. The popular work was one of the first novels that reworked American literature to include diverse cultural expression to include diverse literature across the United States.



			Amy Tan: Weaver of Asian-American Tales Enslow, 2009 young adult, ISBN 978-0-7660-2962-0 Amy Tan is a best-selling novelist and perhaps the most famous Asian-American author today. While her work usually focuses on relationships between immigrant mothers from China and their American-born daughters, Tan's work has a mass appeal that cuts across lines of both culture and gender. Her novel The Joy Luck Club is one of the most well-known and appreciated works by a contemporary Asian-American author.



			Robert Cormier: Writer of The Chocolate War Enslow, 2007 young adult, ISBN 978-0-7660-2962-0 With his novels The Chocolate War and I Am the Cheese, author Robert Cormier earned a reputation for writing novels that realistically and unflinchingly explored the tragic side of human nature. Each of his subsequent novels continued to illustrate the dark consequences of what happens when good people do not oppose the evil forces they encounter. Although his novels have been challenged in school libraries across the country, teens and adults applauded Cormier for taking on tough subjects that depicted realistic characters.



			Such a Pretty Face: Short Stories about Beauty Abrams/Amulet, 2007 young adult, ISBN 978-0810916074 A stellar line-up of young adult writers examines our relationship with beauty in stories that haunt, amuse, stir, and fascinate. A beauty queen with a chin-hair problem, an aspiring model who would rather take pictures than be in them, a boy in love with the gorgeous nurse he's never seen—the teenagers in these stories feel the power of beauty, whether it's to trap, save, torment, or comfort.



			Real for Sure Sister Perspectives Press, 1998 ages 9 to 12, ISBN 978-0960950478 Amanda wants another sibling, but when her parents adopt a little sister, she’s not so sure this was a good idea.



			America in the 20th Century: 1900-1909 American in the 20th Century: 1910-1919 Marshall Cavendish, 1994 young adult, set ISBN 978-1854357366 These illustrated volumes follow a format similar to Time-Life's This Fabulous Century, surveying and illuminating U.S. social and cultural change, decade by decade.



			Lech Walesa: Champion of Freedom Gareth Stevens, 1992 young adult, ISBN This biography presents events in the life of the Polish union organizer who after years of non-violent fighting with the government became president of his country.



			Louis Pasteur: Leading the Way to a Healthier World Gareth Stevens, 1992 ages 9 to 12, ISBN 978-0836806250 This biography tells the story of the nineteenth-century French scientist who discovered the process for destroying harmful bacteria with heat and opened the door to the new science of microbiology.



			John Glenn: Space Pioneer Ballantine Books, 1990 ages 9 to 12, ISBN 978-0449903957 Awards and Recognition 1989 Council for Wisconsin Writers Arthur Tofte Juvenile Book Award