Jacqueline Jules

jjules@jacquelinejules.com
www.jacquelinejules.com

When I was in elementary school. I spent hours playing with jigsaw puzzles. I can remember carefully sorting the end pieces to make a frame. Then I matched pieces with similar colors, turning them around and around until they fit together to make an image. After days of work, I loved seeing  all those interlocking pieces finally joined in a fabulous picture. It made me want to run out to the store and buy a new puzzle--an even bigger one with more pieces. I have no idea how many hours of my childhood were spent playing with jigsaw puzzles, but I know it was a lot.

Now I spend every available free moment playing with words. Writing is a lot like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. You have to make a frame for your story. You have to place similar words together to create images. And you have to arrange and re-arrange the pieces until everything fits together right.

My mind  is always swirling with ideas. Like fireflies on a soft, summer night, they dance in the darkness and dare me to chase them. When I write, I discover who I am and what’s important to me. But most of all, writing gives me the opportunity to make new friends with characters I have imagined. It all begins with the puzzle of words—arranged, re-arranged, taken apart, and put back together in just the right interlocking order.

I became a writer because I love to play with words. Words give us the means to  communicate with others. We speak them, we write them, and we read them. My love of words began with my love of reading. As a child, I sat for hours—sometimes in the crook of an apple tree, sometimes in an easy chair—lost in absorbing mysteries, fantasies, biographies, and realistic or historical fiction. I didn’t have much preference, and still don’t, for a particular genre. I am just an enthusiastic fan of a good story with compelling characters.

I am the author of fourteen children’s books and over sixty published poems. I am also a children’s librarian and a certified teacher. To find out more, please visit my website at www.jacquelinejules.com or click on one of the book covers below.

When Diane behaves unkindly to the new girl from Argentina, she decides to find a way they can communicate and become friends.	It's almost Thanksgiving, and Tuyet is excited about the holiday and the vacation from school. There's just one problem: her Vietnamese American family is having duck for Thanksgiving dinner -- not turkey!	With exuberant illustrations and an engaging style that is suitable for Reader's Theater, Unite or Die traces the challenges, conflicts, and compromises that shaped the living document we call the United States Constitution.

To learn more about this title and other books by Jacqueline Jules, please visit her website at www.jacquelinejules.com.