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Jeri Chase Ferris is the award-winning author of eleven biographies for children and young adults. Her biographies are about "people who made a difference in our world even though all kinds of trouble stood in their way." She specializes in biographies of women and minorities and loves to dig up the truth. "It's not exactly like digging up old bones and pieces of pottery, but it's close. I travel all over the world, snoop around like a detective, find old newspapers and photographs, read old letters and diaries, dig up the facts. Then I put those facts in the biographies I write." For digging up the facts, Jeri won the 2000 Susan B. Anthony Award for "exceptional literary contributions to women's history," in addition to many other awards. One of Jeri's biographies, ARCTIC EXPLORER, tells the story of Matthew Henson. Henson and Robert Peary raced against other explorers and death itself to be the first to reach the North Pole. But because Henson was a black man, his part in the discovery of the North Pole was overlooked and dismissed. Jeri's book tells the true story of Matthew Henson's role.

Visit Jeri's website to find out more about her books.

Jeri's books include:

Demanding Justice: A Story About Mary Ann Shadd Cary (Creative Minds Biography)

Arctic Explorer: The Story of Matthew Henson (Trailblazer Biographies)

Thomas Jefferson: Father of Liberty (Trailblazers Biographies)

Walking the Road to Freedom: A Story About Sojourner Truth (Creative Minds Biography)

Go Free or Die: A Story About Harriet Tubman (Carolrhoda Creative Minds Book)

With Open Hands: A Story About Biddy Mason (Creative Minds Biographies)

What I Had Was Singing: The Story of Marian Anderson (Trailblazer Biographies)

Native American Doctor: The Story of Susan Laflesche Picotte (Trailblazer Biographies)

TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT YOUR PATH TO PUBLICATION.
It all began in the classroom – my classroom, where I taught at Vermont Avenue Elementary School close to downtown Los Angeles. Most (usually all) of my students were minorities, and I wanted role models for them of people who had made a difference in our world. In the 1980s most of the biographies about such people were of white men. This was fine, and certainly they were important men who had done important things, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. So I took a class in writing for children at UCLA and was fortunate enough to have Caroline Arnold as my teacher. The result was GO FREE OR DIE, a biography of Harriet Tubman. This led to an offer from Carolrhoda Books to do four biographies (Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Benjamin Banneker and Noah Webster), which over the years expanded to eleven biographies with them.

WHY DO YOU WRITE NONFICTION?
Because I love bringing people back to life (literarily!), people who have done great and brave and significant things for our country, but have been overlooked for various reasons.

Because I love the research process. I’m a history major. I wanted to be an archaeologist when I was little (after my plan to be a jockey failed), and now I get to dig around and discover facts, some of which have been buried. What a treat!

Because I get to reach back and touch history. I’ve spoken with the great-great-great-grandson of Noah Webster! I’ve met the great-great-granddaughter of Biddy Mason, the slave who walked from Mississippi to Los Angeles, where she became a wealthy philanthropist. Her gggranddaughter wrote the introduction to the book. I’ve met the family of Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the first black woman to enter law school and to be a newspaper publisher. The title of her story is DEMANDING JUSTICE, and that’s exactly what she did for her people all her life. I’ve met the family of the first Native American woman doctor, and the Omaha tribal historian wrote the foreword for the book. I feel as though I’ve been part of the lives of my subjects, from Thomas Jefferson to Marian Anderson. It’s like being the fly on the wall we all want to be.

WHAT DO YOU LIKE BEST ABOUT WRITING NONFICTION?
I love, love, love learning the inside story, finding the hidden facts and the lost information. I am a spy, a mole, the archaeologist I always wanted to be. Really, how can you top that? For example, I found the birth certificate for Marian Anderson, and the Encyclopedia Britannica had to change its incorrect entry. I found the diary Matthew Henson kept in the Arctic - not that it was lost, just hadn’t been accessed. A copy of it lay in a drawer in the National Archives in Washington, DC. I found almanacs written by Benjamin Banneker at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, CA. The registrar of Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia sent me the 1889 academic grades for Native American Susan LaFlesche, which differed from accounts in another book.

These primary sources also provide wonderful teaching tools when I speak to students about the writing process, and the importance of not just copying what someone else has written.

Speaking of speaking – author visits are a fantastic bonus for the author! Kids and their reactions and their intentness just fill me with energy and delight, and give me all sorts of encouragement to go right back to my computer and keep writing. Here’s something new, for me, anyway – a school in the Oakland Hills recently created and performed a musical based on one of my biographies. It is absolutely fantastic, and I’ll have photos and comments (maybe even a video if I can get that part figured out) up on my website soon. These fourth grade students and their teachers absolutely made Biddy Mason come to life in their production. I thought I’d fallen into a time warp and was back in the 1850s!

YOU ARE FANTASTIC AT TRACKING DOWN INTERVIEWS AND RESEARCH. CAN YOU PLEASE GIVE US SOME INSIDE TIPS HOW YOU FIND YOUR INTERVIEW SUBJECTS AND CONDUCT YOUR RESEARCH?
That’s part of the fun! Let’s say I’m writing about Mary Ann Shadd Cary (okay, I did write about her). She lived in the Philadelphia area, in Washington, D.C., and in the Windsor, Ont, Canada area, so first I scour those places for family members. I write local historical societies, use the internet, the phone book, and newspapers of the times for any leads. Authors can always find a connection. Sure enough, I found family members in Canada AND practically next door to where I lived in Los Angeles. This was certainly an unexpected pleasure. Cary’s family members were kind enough to send me personal correspondence of hers, including letters between her and Frederick Douglass.

Anyway, back to the interview subjects. I interviewed by phone, by letter, and/or in person all the existing family members. I interviewed in person and/or by letter the experts at the local historical societies. I studied detailed maps of all the places she lived, so I could see where and how she moved around. She was the first black woman to edit and publish a newspaper, so that actual newspaper would obviously be a crucial research element. You’ve heard that librarians are an author’s best friend? Well, truer words were practically never spoken. A Los Angeles branch librarian found microfiche copies of every 1854-1858 edition of the newspaper from the subscription of Martin Delaney, stored at Smith College, and she arranged to have the film sent to her local branch where I read each microscopic word. (After getting a new and stronger prescription for my glasses I was able to resume normal activities.)

Anyway, back to the interview subjects and research. I located and interviewed experts in the fields of black studies, blacks in Canada, the black press, protest, women’s sufferage, and every other area which Cary’s life impacted. A professor at UC San Diego had just written a definitive dissertation on Cary and the black press, and she (along with others) was kind enough to “vet” my manuscript. Obviously I studied every book and article that had already been published on Cary (few) and her era and her peers and the “issues” of the times (hundreds).

The letter written by Frederick Douglass to Mary Ann Shadd Cary is in a neat, precise and elegant hand. The letters written by Cary are quite the opposite, and make an absolutely wonderful visual display of her personality. She wrote rapidly, powerfully, in a large hand, her thoughts covering the page like a galloping horse. When I hold up enlarged samples of the Douglass and Cary letters in my school visits, the students can easily see the difference in styles and personalities. They also see what a primary source is!

I follow the same structure with every subject, and another joy is that with every different personality, with every different set of problems and prejudices they faced, with every different part of our country in which the subject lived – the research takes on a life of its own. Naturally, I intend that to be the subject’s life. A biographer really needs to become the person he or she is writing about, and I keep a photo or drawing of my subject next to my computer so that I am constantly reminded this is not my story.

It’s been said that one can keep on researching forever and never get the actual book written. This is true. The truly hard part, for me, anyway, is organizing and culling and shaping all that research! But organize and cull and shape I must, to create a dynamic story that puts the reader right into my subject’s life and home and dilemmas.

TELL US ABOUT THE FERRIS COLLECTION AT USC.
Another part of my life is the passion my husband and I developed for Russia. We began traveling there in 1970 and returned yearly until 2000. My husband taught Russian Studies at Beverly Hills High School and in 1970 we (and another teacher) took his class on a field trip. I guess you could say we left our hearts not in San Francisco, but in the USSR. We fell in love with the astounding Russian art, music, writing, architecture; its tragic history, the heroism of its people; the vastness …
My husband saw the need to preserve articles and items which might disappear from history, particularly items related to the Stalin era, and began an all-out effort to find, buy, preserve as much as we could in the time we had.
The result is the Ferris Russian Collection, described as “unmatched in the western world,” now housed at USC in Los Angeles. Please go to http://college.usc.edu/sll/imrc/Ferris.cfm for further information.

TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT YOUR CURRENT BOOK IN PROGRESS AND WHY YOU WERE INTERESTED IN WRITING HISTORICAL FICTION.
One December in Leningrad in the 1980s, in our friends’ small apartment, we were talking about Christmas. The Soviets did not celebrate Christmas, but our friends had bought and decorated a sad little yule tree for the New Year and for us. As we ate and talked, my friend Leonid said, “Whenever I look at the yule tree, I remember the Siege. We didn’t decorate the tree – we ate it.” Leonid was one of the few who had survived, and at that moment I knew his story had to be told.

SURROUNDED is my current manuscript. It is historical fiction, set in Leningrad 1941, and places my main character Yuri (Leonid) in the unspeakable tragedy of the 900 day Siege of Leningrad by the Nazis. How can Yuri survive? How can he keep his little brother alive? How can he save his beloved dog? Can he? From October to December (when the book, not the siege, ends) there is no food, no heat or light or plumbing, no transportation, in a city buried in ice and snow. What does Yuri do?

Aside from this book, why do I love historical fiction? Easy! It combines the best of fiction and non-fiction. I can research and dig and spy and I can create characters to experience all of it!


Hop on over to Anastasia Suen's picture book of the day blog for the nonfiction Monday roundup!

1) Get your 2008 ALA literary award announcements (Newbery, Caldecott, Prinz, King, Batchelder, and more) right here. I'm way behind on my books, but hey, I do read what the bloggers tell me to read. 2) I had fun at my two birthday party gigs yesterday. Unfortunately, Bede was too sick to take Lucia to her classmate's birthday party yesterday (on our 7th wedding anniversary), and she was a bit