Cynthia Cynthia Chin-Lee and her four older siblings were born and raised in Washington,
D.C. by a medical-doctor father and a homemaker and artist mother. Cynthia
began writing for fun when she was in the sixth grade. "I liked writing
poetry and scribbling in my journal because I found it comforting and
therapeutic. I still write for that reason and because I like playing
with words."
Cynthia attended Harvard University, where she studied East Asian Languages. She spent her junior year abroad at the Mandarin Training Center of National Taiwan Normal University. After graduating from Harvard magna cum laude, Cynthia accepted a graduate fellowship at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, and studied at the University of Hawaii.
She
began a technical writing career by writing for banks and high-tech companies.
She has also written freelance articles for magazines and newspapers, as well
as taught writing classes at community colleges and universities. She currently
works as a publications manager at Oracle.
Cynthia's first book, Almond
Cookies & Dragon Well Tea (Polychrome Publishing 1993) is an autobiographical
tale of friendship. She is also the author of A
Is For Asia (Orchard Books 1997), which Ruminator Review called one
of the "Best 100 American Children's Books of the Century," and A
is For the Americas (Orchard Book, 1999), which earned an award from
the National Council for Social Studies and Children's Book as a Notable Children's
Book in Social Studies in 2000 and earned recognition as an Americas Award Commended
Book. Her next books are Amelia
to Zora: Twenty-six Women Who Changed the World, and Akira
to Zoltan: Twenty-six Men Who Changed the World, both illustrated by
Megan Halsey and Sean Addy. Her most recent book is called Operation Marriage (Reach and Teach, PM Press). Based on a true story, the book looks at what it takes for two children to convince their mothers to get married before California's Prop 8 passes and bans gay marriage.
Cynthia
is an active member in the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators
(SCBWI), which can be found on the web at http://www.scbwi.org. The San Franciso Bay Area local chapter's web location
is http://www.scbwisf.org.
She lives in Palo Alto, California with her husband and two children.
