Deborah W. Trotter is a children’s book author, and winner of a Jane Yolen/SCBWI Mid-List Author Award Honor Grant. She loves words and pictures. She loves books, and the fact that reading and writing help us understand the world.
Deborah grew up in a small northern California farming and ranching town in a two-story brick house with no TV or computers. The wonderful county library was just four blocks down the street, filled with book characters waiting to become her friends. A favorite summertime activity was riding her bike to the library and checking out as many books to read as she could carry home in her bike basket. She remembers the pleasure of listening to books read aloud by both of her parents, as well as reading aloud herself to her younger brother. The world outside of books contained Lassen Volcanic National Park an hour’s drive from her home, and it is still one of her favorite places to be.
Now a resident of Contra Costa County, Deborah has spent her adult life in the San Francisco Bay Area. She studied literature at Stanford University while working as a “hasher” in campus dormitory dining halls, then worked after graduation for three more years as Assistant Registrar at the law school. She became an attorney and practiced law for several years. She and her husband raised four children, often spending family vacation time hiking and absorbing the wild outdoors in National Parks in California and other western states.
Deborah enjoyed years of volunteering in her children’s elementary school classrooms, and recently completed nearly a decade of service on the Board and as Chair of the Communications Committee of the Lassen Park Foundation, whose major focus is bringing underserved youth on camping trips in the Park.
When not writing or reading or playing with words (or sometimes while doing those things), Deborah spends time with family and friends, visits National Parks to hike and take photos, knits, loves her cat, and watches wild turkeys, deer, hawks, owls and other creatures that share her yard.
