LeAnne Hardy

My name is LeAnne Hardy. I may have grown up in a Midwestern suburb of Indianapolis, Indiana, but I have now lived in six countries on four continents. I have sipped cream tea in Oxfordshire, slid down rocks in a Mato Grosso river, eaten stewed goat at a Mozambican wedding, climbed Table Mountain and shopped at Mall of America. My books are set in a variety of countries, and each tries to capture the unique feel of that place.

I have degrees in philosophy (from Indiana University, Bloomington, IN) and library and information science (from University of Minnesota, Minneapolis), but my secret love was always children’s literature. I began collecting beautiful picture books before I had the excuse of my own children. I started writing seriously when I was well into my forties. It took me a long time to convince myself that this was not a time-consuming hobby for an obsessive-compulsive perfectionist, but something that could touch the hearts of other people.

My primary target audience is children and young people because they have their whole lives ahead of them. The images of God, themselves and their place in the world planted in young minds can carry them through a lifetime of challenges. Although most of my stories are about faith, I am less interested in the process of coming to faith than I am in people of faith working out what that means in the specific situations of their lives. For more about my motivation for writing, see my article "The Value of Children’s Literature for Twenty-first Century Africa."

I currently live in South Africa where I focus on writing for children affected by HIV/AIDS. There are more than 12 million orphans in Africa, and many more who are living with sick and dying parents. That is more than every single child in the U.S. states of Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Tennessee, and Wisconsin put together. That’s a lot of children growing up without parents. But it’s not just a huge number. Each child is an individual who needs to know God’s love, who needs to see wise choices modeled, who needs to be encouraged not to give up on life. Fiction stories about children like themselves, struggling with the same issues, help young people to know that they are not alone. Find out about other projects to help people affected by HIV/AIDS.

“Mom, do you have to make everything a learning experience?” my kids once complained. (Hey, we were home schooling in Mozambique, Africa. What home schooling Mom could resist pointing out the stratigraphy of a rocky outcropping during vacation in neighboring Swaziland?) The fact is I am a teacher by nature. I enjoy speaking to school groups about being a writer and conducting writers’ workshops, especially with those on the front lines of working with children in difficult situations. Contact me about when I can be in your area.

When I am not at my computer writing, you will probably find me at the ice rink figure skating. Yes, there are ice rinks in Africa, but not many. No, I can’t do a triple axel like you see on TV, but I do a nice Salchow and a decent waltz jump-toe loop combination. Besides, I’m working on this neat book about a figure skater who doesn’t want anyone to find out that her parents have HIV.