• Write a Comment
• Related Blog Posts
• Share on Twitter
• Share on Facebook

Ann Waldron is a published author of children's books and young adult books. Some of the published credits of Ann Waldron include Scaredy Cat, The Integration of Mary-Larkin Thornhill, The Luckie Star.

Ann Waldron was born in Birmingham, Alabama and grew up on Cotton Avenue in West End. She went to Hemphill Grammar School and West End High School. She and her parents and older sister lived three blocks from the Vine Street Presbyterian Church, which they attended twice every Sunday and on Wednesday nights for prayer meeting. They spent summers on an 80-acre farm her parents owned in St. Clair County, near Cook Springs.

Ann was co-editor of her high school newspaper (the principal decreed that, although she was able enough, she was too much of a discipline problem to be the editor in chief). She did become editor of the Crimson-White, the student newspaper at the University of Alabama, from which she graduated in 1945. She attended Hudson Strode's creative writing class at the university and appeared in Blackfriars plays.

Her first job was with the Atlanta Constitution, where she was a reporter for two and a half years. It was there that she met her husband, Martin Waldron, who was then a student at Georgia Tech and who happened to see an advertisement for a copy boy's job on a bulletin board at Tech. He applied, got the job, and never looked back. He realized that he was destined to be a newspaper reporter, not an engineer, and he dropped out of Tech.

Martin later finished college at Birmingham-Southern while he worked for the Birmingham Post-Herald. Ann worked on The Progressive Farmer magazine. When Martin was hired by the Tampa Tribune the Waldrons, with their two children, Peter and Lolly, moved to Florida, where Martin first covered the citrus industry in Lakeland, and then the state capitol in Tallahassee.

The women's editor of the Tribune, knowing of Ann's journalistic experience, asked her to write a weekly feature on women in state government. By now there were two more children--Thomas William and Boojie (real name Martin Oliver Waldron III)--but she managed the one-day-a-week job happily. In fact, when she was in the hospital once, Martin wrote her column for her.

In 1960, the St. Petersburg Times hired both of them, but let them stay in Tallahassee. Martin led the team that did the series of stories exposing corruption in the management of the Florida Turnpike Authority that won the Times a Pulitzer Prize for Community Service.

Ann's column was still appearing in both the Times and the Miami Herald in 1965 when the New York Times hired Martin to open a bureau in Houston, Texas. The Waldrons moved to Houston, where Ann became book editor of the Houston Chronicle, and began writing children's books.

In 1975, the Times transferred Martin to New York and the Waldrons settled in Princeton. "We looked at suburbs on Long Island, Westchester County, Monclair, Red Bank, and Princeton, and we loved Princeton," Ann said. She took classes at Princeton University and went to work there as the associate editor of a quarterly magazine, University. She continued to write children's books, published six novels for young people, and wrote a book about art forgeries.

In 1981, Martin died, and Ann went to work fulltime for Princeton as the editor of its Campaign Bulletin. Children's books no longer held the same fascination for her--she wanted to do something different, and settled on a biography of Caroline Gordon. Biography seemed to be the ideal kind of book for her, since she could use research skills learne din journalism and bring people to life using some of the techniques of fiction I had learned. "Princeton University was an immensely helpful employer," she said. "My boss gave me every Wednesday afternoon off so I could do research in the library where Caroline Gordon's papers were held. Often in my travels for the Campaign Bulletin, I could do an interview for the biography as well."

For her next biography Ann wanted to write about a southern white liberal. "I think they got a raw deal," she said. "They were reviled at home for being traitors and going too far, and they were attacked in the North for not going far enough." She chose Hodding Carter, the fearless editor of the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Mississippi. "I like to write about Southerners," she said, "because even after all these years in the North, I'm not sure I understand how Northerners think."

While she was doing research in Mississippi, Ann got to know Eudora Welty, and decided to write about her next. Welty declined to cooperate and so Ann began the arduous task of writing an unauthorized biography. She attended the biography seminar, a group of professional biographers that met at New York University, and there met the authors of three other unauthorized biographies--Carl Rollyson and his wife Lisa Paddock, Marion Meade, and the late Carole Klein. "We all encouraged one another," she said.

After this project, Ann wanted another change of pace and began writing mysteries. The first of these, The Princeton Murders, appeared in January 2003. Two more are scheduled.

Ann continues to write for various magazines and newspapers, reviewing children's books for the Philadelphia Inquirer every week, as she has done for 22 years.

"I would like to think that reading good writers influenced my work," she said. "Reading journalism by people like Rebecca West certainly inspired me to try harder, but of course I never matched the great ones' accomplishments. I still read a great deal--ficiton as well as nonfiction."

Her children are all grown and married. Peter is director of the Rogers Center for the Arts at Merrimack College in Massachussetts; his wife is the former Catherine Heimsath. Lolly is managing editor of the Princeton Alumni Weekly, married to Richard O'Brien, an editor at Sports Illustrated, and the mother of two children, Daisy and Valentina; Thomas William, who was a reporter at the Baltimore Sun is now a freelance writer, working on a book about the Pride of Baltimore, the tall ship that sank in the Caribbean. He is the husband of Stephanie Shapiro, a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, and father of two boys, Ben and Henry. Boojie is married to Roxane Shelly, and living in Olympia, Washington with their two children, Miranda and August.

- above from http://www.annwaldron.com/bio.htm

Ann Waldron is a published author of children's books and young adult books. Some of the published credits of Ann Waldron include Scaredy Cat, The Integration of Mary-Larkin Thornhill, The Luckie Star. Ann Waldron was born in Birmingham, Alabama and grew up on Cotton Avenue in West End. She went to Hemphill Grammar School and West End High School. She and her parents and older sister lived three... More