About Andrea

I write books for young people and adults that have been published around the world. I also teach creative writing to kids.

I have several new picture books for young readers: City of Neighbors and City Streets are for People (published by Groundwood) and Barnaby (from Owlkids).  I’m also the author of the first two books in the Groundwood ThinkCities nonfiction series about sustainability and urban systems: City of Water and A Forest in the City.

Big Water (Orca Books) is my first novel for young adults. It’s inspired by the true story of the wreck of the S.S. Asia, a passenger steamer on Georgian Bay that sank in a fall storm in 1882. The only survivors were a pair of teenagers, one a boy, the other a girl.

Eat this! How Fast Food Marketing Gets You to Buy Junk (and how to fight back) earned star reviews in both Kirkus and School Library Journal. It followed up What’s for Lunch? How Schoolchildren Eat Around the World, which was published in Canada and the U.S. by Red Deer Press as well as in Brazil and South Korea.

Before I started writing books, I wrote and edited for magazines and newspapers like Toronto Life, Cottage Life, Chatelaine, Canadian Geographic, Explore and Today’s Parent, among other publications.

I spent my childhood in Barrie, Ontario, where I played lots of sports, read lots of books and wrote many stories. I attended McGill University and studied history. I live with my family in an old house in the west end of Toronto where I write, grow vegetables and dream of being in the mountains.