Candace Fleming

Courage - To face difficulty or danger and express your beliefs even if you’re afraid.

Candace Fleming’s birthday is on May 24th.

Candace has always been a storyteller. She could tell a good tale and told them all the time. They were such good stories people thought she was telling the truth. She simply enjoyed telling a good story... and seeing her listener's reaction. Her parents called them “imaginative” and encouraged her to put her stories down on paper. Once she began writing, she filled notebook after notebook with stories, poems, and plays.

She never really thought of becoming an author. Instead, she went to college and discovered a passion for history. “Some of the best stories are true ones—tales of heroism and villainy made more incredible by the fact they really happened.”

As a young child growing up in central Illinois, Candace and her friends would ride their bikes to Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin. Sometimes they would “play house” inside the old cabin. Almost every Friday night from fifth to eighth grade she slept in a house that had a bedroom Lincoln actually had slept in. It was her best friend Emily’s bedroom! Candace wanted people to remember Lincoln as “a man just like us; a human being just like us,” so she wrote the nonfiction book, The Lincolns.

Writing picture books is like “skipping.” Candace says she considers it “pure joy” and “the best job ever.” She uses her formula, CLAPS, in her stories. C=character, L=location, A=action, P=problem, and S=solve the problem with “the magic three.”

Candace lives in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois.