The Monsters Next Door

Marcia Thornton Jones is co-author of the bestselling THE ADVENTURES OF THE BAILEY SCHOOL KIDS series, along with single titles like CHAMP. She has been writing for Scholastic for almost twenty years! Marcia lives and writes in Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband and their two cats.

I first started dreaming about being a writer when I read picture books to my first grade students. The dream got bigger when I became a school librarian. Luckily for me, a fellow teacher had the same dream. Marcia Thornton Jones and I wrote together for a year and a half during our lunch period. Then we had a really bad day that turned into our first book, Vampires Don’t Wear Polka Dots. Our first story became a series and my love of series writing was born. I found that students feel a security in what they can expect from characters in a series. My newest series is Mermaid Tales. Third grade merstudents have adventures in school and with ocean creatures!