The Treasure Haunt

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!

Guy Francis spends most of his time drawing, painting, and drawing some more. He has done a variety of illustration work in the children’s market, including editorial and educational illustration, chapter books, and picture books. He freelances from his home in Provo, Utah, where his wife and four children are his own personal art critics and bring a healthy bit of chaos to the studio. Every now and then he gets out of the house and heads to the mountains with his family. You can visit him online at www.guyfrancis.com.Readers will smile as Clark learns the true meaning of Christmas.