Laurie Halse Anderson is a Margaret A. Edwards and ALAN Award winning author. Daughter of a university chaplain, Laurie writes often about the moral and emotional issues surrounding adolescence. Her first big hit, Speak, follows a year in the life of a young woman who is sexually assaulted at the beginning of her freshman year of high school, and was made into a major motion picture. Many of Laurie's books come from Penguin although she is not limited to one publisher. She currently lives in the woods near Mexico, New York, with her husband, Scot. Laurie's exploits can be found on her Mad Woman in the Forest blog. Laurie has also begun to videoblog, vlog. Laurie does most of her writing in a beautiful cottage her husband constructed for her.